For actor Alan Cumming, things just keep getting better—and in many ways, he has his dogs to thank!

Alan Cumming is in James Bond mode, whipping off his sunglasses at an outdoor café in Manhattan’s East -Village as his dogs, Honey and Leon, sit placidly under the table. “Suppose,” Alan suggests, “you were writing something in a country that wouldn’t let you publish it.” He pulls off the glasses’ earpiece to reveal a tiny computer flash drive inside. “Here is how you get it out of the country.” The spy glasses are courtesy of Calvin Klein, from a swag bag. “They’re so handy when traveling,” says Alan, straight-faced. “I carry all my -arrangements on them.” The musical arrangements are for his touring cabaret act, spun off from his album I Bought a Blue Car Today. That memorable title comes, he says, from “the sentence I had to write down to prove I speak English when I became an American citizen.”

As an actor, Alan has carved out a career playing devious and enigmatic souls, from the creepily omniscient MC in Broadway’s Cabaret to his present incarnation as political fixer Eli Gold on the CBS series The Good Wife—but offstage, the Scottish-born star is better known for candid conversation and a refreshingly open approach to life, one he’s many times said he owes at least in part to his lifelong love of dogs.

Although Honey, a Collie-Shepherd mix, and Leon, a shorthaired Chihuahua, are the first dogs Alan has owned as an adult, Kerry and Shona, two West Highland Terriers, brought adventure and, more important, comfort to his childhood. Alan’s father, the forester of Scotland’s Panmure Estate, was physically and emotionally abusive. Alan -escaped to the woods. “My brother was six years older, so he didn’t really want to be with me,” he recalls. “I’d just go into the forest and walk with the dogs, make up stories— I think that’s how I became an actor. There was a lot of spying—the dogs and I were spies. I’d also pretend they were lost and then I’d find them again.”