Alan Cumming on ‘Chimp Crazy’: ‘I Really Do Understand the Deep Love’

In 1997, Alan Cumming appeared in the film “Buddy,” playing an animal handler hired by an eccentric socialite (Rene Russo) who maintained a menagerie in her Long Island home. One of his co-stars was Tonka, a male chimpanzee on the cusp of adolescence. Cumming felt a special bond with Tonka.

“He was very gentle,” Cumming, 59, said during a recent video call. “When the other chimps would get a little overwrought, he was a calming influence, a mediator.”

Soon after filming ended, Tonka retired. (Once chimps go through puberty, they are considered potentially too strong and sexually aggressive to work on camera.) In 2017, Cumming, a supporter of the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and a longtime vegan — “I thought if Mike Tyson could do it, I could do it,” he said — learned that Tonka was being held in substandard conditions at a former breeding facility in Festus, Mo.

What happened next is the principal subject of the HBO series “Chimp Crazy,” which premiered on Sunday, a wild and occasionally woolly four-part documentary from Eric Goode, a director of “Tiger King.” (The three remaining episodes will air weekly.)

PETA secured the release of six chimpanzees from the facility in 2021. Tonka was not among them. Eventually, PETA offered a $10,000 reward for news of Tonka’s whereabouts. Cumming matched that amount.

While the twisty four episodes tell several fraught and often violent stories of chimp-human interactions, its permed, lip-plumped focus is Tonia Haddix, the owner of the Festus animals, including Tonka, and an exotic animal broker who describes herself as the “Dolly Parton of chimps.” (Given the reputation of “Tiger King” as a series that exposed animal mistreatment, Goode approached her through a proxy, a former circus clown who posed as the series’s director.) Cumming claims to feel sympathy for the women Goode turns his cameras on, even as they failed the animals in their care.