Has America regressed since Obama? “Oh God, yes,” he says. “No matter your leanings, it was a time of great positivity and hope. Now, I don’t think there’s hope. Certainly not positivity. [2008] was the turning point, and I don’t think it can be underestimated how much the race card wasn’t dealt with during Obama’s tenure.

“The whole, ‘When they go low, we go high’ – I’m not sure I agree with that, in this instance. Because going high means not talking about it. And what happened was that as soon as he was out, we discovered we’re in an even more racist country, because while we’ve had this black president, the flames of racism have been fanned. So it was a turning point in a good way, and a bad way.”

Cumming’s mother-in-law is a Trump-voter, and he’s made his feelings known. “I say, ‘Just so you know, I think you’re voting against me, against your son, against poor people, against people of colour – you’re persecuting all of these people. That’s all I want you to acknowledge.’ So that doesn’t go down well, but I do it… in a cute way.”

His anti-Republican leanings have seen him receive death threats on social media before, and when potential Twitter owner Elon Musk said he’d allow Trump back on the site, Cumming abruptly deleted his account (“The president incited violence, and you’re going to let him do that? That seems lawless”). Today, he reaffirms a previous pledge that, after a quarter of a century, he will leave the country and return to Britain if Trump comes back. Maybe even if he doesn’t.

“Yeah, [I will]. I don’t think he’s going to come back, but I still feel I might leave. I don’t know, I worry about what’s going to happen in a few years, and don’t know if there’s a place for me there. I don’t want to live in a country where I get death threats for posting on Instagram!” The hands go up again. “Because that’s nuts.”

Releasing a second memoir by your mid-50s might seem like the behaviour of either a wondrous ego or a debt-ridden publishing house but Cumming’s life has taken enough turns to justify a dozen volumes. He was born in Perthshire, Scotland, where his father, Alex, was the head forester on the Panmure Estate on the Angus coast. There, Cumming, his loving mother, Mary Darling, and older brother, Tom, grew up in fear of Alex, who was violent and abusive to the boys, as well as a serial adulterer.

“I actually think the prolonged period of tension before landing his blows, as we were systematically inspected, chided and humiliated, had a far worse effect than the actual hits,” he wrote in his first autobiography, Not My Father’s Son. “My father told me I was worthless, my mother that I was precious. They couldn’t both be right, but they evened each other out and I began to make my own mind up, not just about myself but about everything that was going on around me.”

Alex would challenge his sons to complete increasingly difficult maintenance tasks around the estate, then beat them when they failed. Cumming escaped to drama school, training at what is now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and beginning a career that has never been short of work.

By 20, Cumming was married to the actress Hilary Lyon, who would play Ophelia opposite his Hamlet at the Donmar Theatre eight years later, the same year they divorced. The torture of his childhood caught up with him in his late 20s, when his mental health collapsed just as his screen career was taking off.

As he writes in his second memoir, Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life, even on the day of his GoldenEye audition in 1994, “the shadow of suicide had entered my mental periphery.” Yet he still got the part of the baddie, a Russian computer geek. “The fact that I didn’t want to let anyone down by postponing or cancelling the meeting says a lot about how little I valued myself at the time. Before, immediately afterwards, and, indeed, during, I was a zombie.”