Alan Cumming reveals his true feelings about horrifying Tip Toe ending

Warning: spoilers for Tip Toe. 

As the closing credits of Tip Toe rolled, I sat stunned and cried hard, ugly tears. 

I’d known from the opening minutes of the first episode of Russell T Davies’ latest drama how it would end.

We’d already seen Leo (Alan Cumming) hanging from a lamppost like a twisted version of the Union flags so-called patriots hung across UK cities last summer. 

I knew Clive (David Morrissey) would have something to do with it. I knew the agony it would cause Leo’s friends. I knew it would hurt to watch. 

But I didn’t know how cruel it would be. I didn’t know how much relish Leo’s murderers would feel as they executed him. I didn’t know how much it would hurt to watch. 

And neither it turns out did one of the show’s stars, Alan Cumming, who told me how he felt filming a lynching during a summer where a ‘mad frenzy of fury and nationalism’ had swept the country in a ‘horrible and aggressive way. ‘

‘[Leo’s] death was the first thing I talked to Russell about before I got the script,’ he told Metro. ‘I knew he’d die, but the ferociousness of it, I thought, was brilliant.’

Of course, filming your own execution at the hands of drunken bigots is hardly an easy thing to do. 

‘It affected me,’ Alan admitted. ‘Everyone was so kind and caring about it, but obviously, it was so traumatic to do. Just having something around your neck like that is so traumatic.’

Following filming that scene, Alan and the crew took a week off, something he said was a relief, but when he returned to set, something had changed, and he was ready for the show to end. 

‘I loved doing this,’ he began. ‘I love playing Leo. I love this show. I’ve wanted to work with Russell in this way for so long, and it’s finally happened, and it’s this incredible role for me.   

‘It’s an incredible part, and for a man of my age and my sexuality and my place in life, everything about it is just the perfect confluence, and yet it was the part that I think I have most wanted to be over.’

‘I had such fun. I loved the people, but him, the heaviness of [Leo], what I carried, it was very difficult.’

Alan then said what made this so troubling was how much of himself he put into Leo. 

‘Inevitably, any character [you play], there’s you in it, your spirit,’ he explained.

‘So I was murdered by a group of people who think I am worthless, and it takes you a while to get over that. I really connected with Leo. I’ve got a lot in common with them…it was really, really difficult, and I am very emotional about it.’

After filming, Alan told me he had a digital detox, driven in part by the distaste he felt for social media, which played such a negative role in Leo’s story. 

Of course, it wasn’t Facebook posts or comments on X that hanged Leo, it was his neighbour Clive, so what did he feel in those closing moments?

Well, according to David Morrissey, it’s ‘regret, it’s bravado, it’s sorrow.’

‘I think it’s all those things,’ he told me. ‘When we did that, I didn’t know what I was going to feel until I got there. There’s a moment when he’s standing there, and they all run away, and he’s on his own, and that’s when he goes, and all those things hit him like a train.’

However, for David, the real gut punch isn’t the murder, it’s the final postscript. 

A small scene where we see Leo and his friend Stephanie at dinner, where they’re talking about some impending disaster neither of them can quite make out.

‘She’s just talking about, and he says, “I can feel something’s coming”, and you, as the audience, are ahead of him,’ he said. 

‘That’s the bit that broke me. It was having that little scene at the end, between them, and then talking about the life they want to have going forward, and that was heartbreaking.’

But what about the man who wrote the scene? 

Well, he was surprisingly laconic about Leo’s fate but drew my attention to the final epilogue, where it’s revealed Leo was remembered falsely as a convicted paedophile. 

‘What gets me about that is it’s undeniably true,’ he said icily. ‘That’s what would happen.’

Tip Toe is available to watch now on Channel 4. 

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