Any Day Now is a moving drama inspired by real life events. In the 1970s, a gay couple fights a biased legal system to keep custody of the abandoned mentally handicapped teenager that comes to live under their roof.  Here’s what star Alan Cumming had to say about working on the project:

Rudy’s nature is flamboyant, even effusive, but it struck me the key to your performance is locating his solitude, even
loneliness.

I thought a lot about how to deal with the dichotomy in Rudy’s character: the brashness and confidence he shows at the beginning of the movie alongside the tenderness he shows with Marco and Paul. I realised that someone like Rudy would need an armour, a protective shield to help him get by. I wanted to
give him a swagger that would make sense of his survival, and then to use the other stuff for self-‐deprecation and humor. So I think you’re right, solitude is a big part of what I was trying to get to, because I think when we meet him in the movie it’s the first time he hasn’t been on his own, and it’s very new to him.

Was working in period–the recent past, the late 1970s– liberating for you?

Yes, definitely, because it makes the experience less contemporary and therefore you are allowed to fly a little bit. A period piece, even a recent one like this, gives you a bit of freedom to invent and imagine, and I love that. So often ‘contemporary, in acting terms, means the volume is turned down, literally and figuratively, and I’ve never understood why.The movie tackles a great deal, the political, cultural, the legal ramifications; but it seems, at heart, what makes it compelling is that it focuses on outsiders, people who are by circumstance or personal choices disenfranchised in some way.I think all great drama involves a sense of the outsider, people who are different in some way but there but for the grace of God go us. In Any Day Now we have three outsiders all trying to be allowed to love each other, something that nobody should be prevented from doing. And they’re on a new and magical journey together that the audience gets to come on too. The movie has a lot to say about gay rights, adoption, how we view disability. Mostly it is about family and the basic desire we all have to care and love others.

What was your emotional interaction with Isaac Leyva, who plays Marco; did you feel protective towards him because of his inexperience, or did you want to give him his own space for his own personality to emerge?

Isaac didn’t need any space for his personality to emerge. His personality enters the room before him. He is an absolutely amazing and beautiful boy and we got along like a house on fire as soon as we met. I did feel protective towards him, but only in the way I’d feel protective towards someone who had never done a film before or been in that sort of situation. Working with Isaac was the best thing about this whole experience for me. Everything he felt was so completely pure and immediate and he really reminded me of what acting is supposed to be about. I adore him, and will always be grateful to him.

Within the framework of the legal struggle to gain custody of the child, the movie is, at heart, a love story of contrasting types– your liberated cabaret performer staged against Garret Dillahunt’s closeted professional. How were you and Garret able to achieve such an observational, tender rapport?

Sometimes things just happen. Garret and I had never met before and indeed we only met a day or two before our first scene together, when we were both getting wig fittings. But I immediately felt comfortable with him and I think we just looked each other in the eyes and thought, ‘I trust you. This is huge, emotionally and spiritually, what we’re about to go through together, but I trust you’. And I never felt out of synch with him for a second. It really was just about us both each other from the start.

Music is central to Rudy. The movie’s very emotional ending is amplified by your great version of the classic Bob Dylan protest song, “I Shall Be Released.” Is that a piece you suggested to Travis Fine, the director?

I didn’t know the song at all. And for a long time the film didn’t end that way. Often with films the songs change around a lot because it is so difficult and expensive to get the rights and permission. So it was quite late on that ‘I Shall Be Released’ came into the mix, and to let me hear it Travis sent me the YouTube clip of Bette Midler singing it in a bath house in New York in the ‘70s, with Barry Manilow accompanying her. I thought, ‘Could you have made this any more daunting?’ It is the most incredible and harrowing rendition of it. When it came for me to record it, it was quite late in the shoot and I had a sense of Rudy’s grief and I tried to put that into his performance. I think the very last moment when he looks at Paul and sings ‘I swear my love. We shall be released’ is such a beautiful moment and it is so great how the song works so well for our story, and of course our title.

What do you think accounts for the almost visceral reaction people have had to the film so far?

I think it is the fact that people see three characters who obviously love each other and who are good for each other being prevented from being together because of hatred and bigotry and prejudice, and sadly although much has changed and much has improved, those emotions still exist in our world today. The audience knows that Rudy and Paul and Marco should be together, but they also know they live in a world that stops that from happening and so they feel complicit, and that’s why I think it really gets to them.