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Russell Brand - 2010-10-01 - Paul O'Grady
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Confessions of a randy dandy (Russell Brand features)
russell brand interviewed by jeremy paxman!
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click the link in the top right for part 2
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click the link in the top right for part 2
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Russell Brand: the womaniser and drug addict in me has died
Gone are the shock tactics, the womanising, even the sleeping pills. An altogether more family-friendly Russell Brand talks Katy Perry, 'Arthur' and his changed ways
Craig McLean
9 Apr 2011
telegraph.co.uk[/align]
Onto the set of Saturday Night Live stalks lanky Russell Brand, all teeth and hair and limbs, clean-shaven and big-jawed and tight-trousered. “Don’t be alarmed,” he tells the excitable, eager-to-whoop audience, “I’ve not come here to levy unreasonable taxes.” Then, pausing only to grin nervously, the 35-year-old comedian, writer and newly minted film star adds, “I’m much more famous in England.”
It’s eight o’clock on a February evening in New York. Britain’s newest international star is getting stuck into the dress rehearsal for the latest episode of America’s long-running television comedy institution. Every week the show has a guest celebrity host and this week it’s Brand’s turn.
“In the pursuit of success,” he will say later, “whatever trade you’re in, you’re always looking for recognisable landmarks. Yeah, right, I’ve been on the cover of Rolling Stone, I've been in The Simpsons, I've hosted Saturday Night Live.” This statement, it will transpire, is typical Brand: enumerating – bragging about – his own achievements, yet also managing to appear giddy with childlike chuffedness at his own good fortune rather than come over like an insufferable, blowhard ego-monster.
Analysing and dissecting this stuff is almost his stock-in-trade. Over the last year he’s been filming a documentary, The Big I Am. Like his two bestselling autobiographies, Booky Wook and Booky Wook 2, it explores fame, and his pursuit of love and experience of it.
Brand opens Saturday Night Live with a short stand-up routine. A veteran of “hundreds and hundreds” of comedy gigs in grotty pubs, insalubrious back rooms and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – as well as many hours of live television, hosting things like Big Brother’s Little Brother – this is his comfort zone. As he’s always done, this only child of a single-parent mother talks about himself, and he talks about his life.
But whereas previously his life in London was a carousel of drug and alcohol-crazed womanising – then, post-rehab, sober womanising – and self-made scandal, his new existence is very different. Now he lives in Los Angeles with his wife, American pop star Katy Perry. After eight years of sobriety, he practises yoga and Transcendental Meditation. Such is his new-found Hollywood “clout”, he has films made around his character (Get Him To The Greek), is able to have other films greenlit (the forthcoming remake of Arthur), and is probably going to be making a film with Tom Cruise (Rock Of Ages, an adaptation of the Broadway musical).
As an expat, he tells the SNL audience, he now feels very patriotic. “Colin Firth is the new Diana!” he says by way of explaining his teary love of The King’s Speech. Then he talks a little about life chez Perry-Brand. It’s great, and it’s ordinary, and it’s great that it’s ordinary. Now his “problems” are things like Perry blithely telling him she’s lent his car to her brother. And now, when someone rings the doorbell at the home in Los Angeles that Brand bought for $3.25million in December 2009, his immediate thought process is no longer “doorbell, police, raid, sniffer dogs, flush drugs!”
“I had to address my Englishness, address the way I dress, address the biggest thing in the room – that I’m married to a pop star,” he reflects later. “And people liked it, and I was happy. I thought it was sweet and nice. I also thought it was professional. That’s what I should do in that situation,” says the man still infamous for the 2008 “Sachsgate” scandal that led to him being sacked from BBC Radio 2.
In some ways LA-living, Hollywood-endorsed, happily married Brand is, it seems, all grown up. But it’s not come without some effort. “I’ve got a default setting of being mischievous,” he acknowledges. “If I’m tired, for example, I’ll gravitate towards comedy about sex or shocking stuff. So I have to really focus and be diligent ’cause that’s only a small fraction of who I am, and it’s a bit lazy sometimes. It’s a bit of a tick, a go-to place.”
His funniest SNL sketch has Brand playing an old wizard who visits a young girl in her room at Dreary Wick Orphanage. It’s full of innuendo, albeit innuendo emanating from the (adult) actress playing the girl. Yet the sketch is not used in the final show. “It was good, wasn’t it?” he says afterwards. “It was a bit edgy for them – they would have left it in. But it was…”
Creepy? “Exactly. I thought to myself: ‘I’ve got Arthur coming out in a month, I’ve got Hop, a kids cartoon movie, out a week before that. I have played the sex and drug card pretty strongly for quite a while! So now I don’t need to telegraph that.
“I feel like you have to eventually become aware of what it is you’re trying to present. And you can regard that as cynical, but I just think, I’m doing this and I wanna be successful. I want people to see the films I’m doing.”
It was, in the end, Brand’s decision to scrap the wizard. “Although it was a good sketch for me, I thought overall…” You’d take a longer view? “Exactly,” says the comedian who for so long lived in and traded on the short, sharp, shock. “That’s what I’m trying to do now.”
A few weeks later, I catch up with Brand again. We meet at Heathrow airport one Friday afternoon, sit opposite each other on a flight to Cologne – his 6ft 9in Essex bodyguard between us – then are met by dedicated airport staff at the other end. They usher us through security. Then we travel in to the hotel where we’re all staying. Then, a couple of hours after landing, after he’s put in some gym time, Brand and I meet in the hotel bar.
This is how things have to be with him and his schedule these days. He’d flown into Heathrow from LA that same day, and was travelling on to Cologne to meet “the wife” – Perry’s 10-month California Dreams world tour was playing the German city. Being apart, travelling, “is a good way of…” he begins – Brand has a huge and ornate vocabulary – “solipsistic meme quotidian complicité”.
He loves the sound of words and crafting baroque sentences. But he also talks very fast, one thought falling over another, and he often leaves sentences unfinished. “It makes me appreciate it,” he continues, meaning he and Perry’s relationship, “and keeps it kind of exciting.”
What did he make of the media reports that their five-month-old marriage (they wed in India, a year on from meeting at the MTV Video Music Awards, which Brand hosted) was already in “crisis”, and that they were in couple’s counselling?
“One of the most significant achievements of mine over the last six months is that I don’t look on Google any more. I’m over six months Google clean,” grins the former addict. “So I don’t have any interaction with [those rumours]. At all. It’s a really, really normal marriage. But yeah, I did hear that one about the counselling. But I have a really healthy attitude towards that stuff now – I can’t control what people say. I have now, for the first time ever, a domestic private life, and I’m happy with it. We’re managing it really well at the moment, I’m really proud of it as a simple, healthy, fun relationship.”
Hence him Tweeting a picture of Perry first thing in the morning, head on the pillow and face make-up free? “I didn’t mean to do that!” he insists. “I was mucking around. She took a photo of me and went, ‘I’m gonna put that on Twitter…’ So I took a photo of her. But I went further and I clicked on the Twitter thing. I thought I had successfully deleted it – but I sent it to two million people.”
Was she annoyed? “She was for a moment, but she’s all right about it. But I don’t think any woman likes to be so exposed without make-up to millions of people. But I should tell her, ‘People like that photo, it’s humanised you’,” he jokes. ‘“You’ve a whole new audience out there’.”
He hasn’t seen the trailer for the Smurfs movie due to be released this summer, in which Perry voices the only female Smurf, Smurfette. One scene has Smurfette evoking Marilyn Monroe’s billowing dress scene from The Seven Year Itch. So that’s his wife’s character – coquettish Smurf. “Yeah, makes sense,” he shoots back. “Good casting.”
Perry comes offstage and rings him just as our interview is finishing, around midnight. He’s to meet her in the underground car park, and together they will travel on to the hotel where, it transpires, he’s actually staying.
“You get used to it,” he says of his heavy flying schedule. He managed to sleep fine on the overnight transatlantic flight. Did he take a sleeping pill? “Mother’s little helper? Nah, I can’t fuck around with all that.” Not even prescription ones? “Especially not those. I’d start taking ’em every day.”
We talk about Arthur, a remake of the 1981 comedy which had Dudley Moore in the title role, Liza Minnelli as his true love interest, and John Gielgud playing his faithful butler. In the new version, the butler is Helen Mirren, but Arthur is still a boozy English billionaire trying to duck an arranged marriage in favour of a girl from the wrong side of the tracks.
“Arthur is a sweet and charming bon viveur, but also kind of loving. The line from the original that really resonated with me is when Gielgud goes to visit Minnelli, and she goes: ‘Did Arthur send you here?’ He goes, ‘No, Arthur is far too fine a person to be involved in anything as tawdry as this.’ It made me think of the British aristocracy’s traditional role as stalwarts of decency. They would have led the line in battle. Along with their privilege came duty.
“So I tried to play Arthur in that way. Even though he’s a billionaire, he loves people, he sees good in people. He wants them to have fun, and is joyous. So that for me was very attractive. And obviously as well, it made Dudley Moore a superstar. So it's an unbelievable opportunity really,” he adds in typical straight-talking style.
Brand doesn’t do coy, or faux humility. His ambition is his rocket-fuel, and whereas before that occasionally landed him in trouble, now it keeps him on the straight and narrow. As someone who’s stared into the toilet bowl of drug-fuelled madness, what does Brand make of Charlie Sheen’s current situation? “Well, actually, it’s something that I’m quite cautious about. Because I don’t think it’s a subject for entertainment. And I always wouldn’t want to be judgemental in any way.
“I’ve spoken to him a few times, you can tell he’s just a brilliant, smart bloke. And evidently, from the tests he’s had, he’s not taking drugs [any more]. But it’s gonna take him a while. And he’s burning AA books – he’s really not up for [rehab]. But,” he adds, “he’s in the right place – if he sorts himself out, he’ll be OK. Because Hollywood redeems.”
Has Perry been Brand’s redemption? It seems that way. After years of mind-boggling womanising – Booky Wook 2 begins with a very funny account of his relationship with Kate Moss – Brand has settled down. Did meeting Perry suddenly shut off his wild-oats urges? “Yeah, it was like that,” he admits. For one thing, for the first time he had “parity” with a woman. Previously his fame and celebrity “imbalanced” all his relationships. He describes the manner of his meeting Perry as “phenomenal”.
“The night before I went on my first date with her I was living my old life! Close one door because new people were coming in. And from then to now, I’ve grasped this tendril and been on that since.” Was it a surprise to him, that his oversexualised tap could be turned off so suddenly? “It’s been extraordinary,” he nods. “I’m still surprised by it – surprised that I’m here in Cologne to meet my wife, get to spend a couple of days with her…Ten years ago my life was so far away from this people just wouldn’t have said this would happen to me. Except for me – I was the only person who thought it was possible. And much as I wanted to be successful, I wanted to have a partner and a family. There were long periods amid my single life where I’d think, ‘It’d be good to have a mate’.
“There was one particular occasion when I was staying in some country hotel and I was watching Watership Down. And looking at the fields in it, I turned to the girl I was with and said, ‘Oh look, that’s like that walk we went on yesterday.’ And as I was saying it I was thinking, ‘Oh f, that wasn’t her. That was Yesterday Girl!’” He grins sheepishly at his own, well, awfulness.
“So there was no development. And as well as there being no development in the relationships, there was no development in me. I just skimmed along the surface of stuff for a very long while, and never had a chance to go deeper.”
Yes, he says, they both want children, and he admits he hankers after a return to Britain. “I secretly want to do that. I have a fear of hearing my American children speak to me in American accents.”
Would Perry be up for that? “I’m sure I can sell her Great Britain on some level. The Cotswolds — people seem to be up for that don’t they? Stone-walled cottage…” But in the meantime there’s a Hollywood career to take care of. This summer Brand will either be filming a film called Bad Father, or another with the working title of West Texas United. In the latter he would play a former West Ham footballer – Brand is a Hammers fan – who pitches up in the Lone Star State to teach soccer to local kids. “It’s about squandering greatness,” he says.
The film with Cruise would be more of a stretch for his still-nascent acting skills. He’s been offered the film – no audition required – and he’s confident it’ll happen. But still: is there a bit of him going “bloody hell, I’m a goon from Grays in Essex – and I’m about to work with Tom Cruise?”
“Yeah, there is, there is,” he says thoughtfully. “It doesn’t seem fully real. But it happens by increments. If someone had said when I was doing Bugsy Malone at Grays School, ‘You wanna do a movie with Tom Cruise?’, I’d have gone, ‘When?’ And they’d have gone, ‘In 20 years!’ “I’d be like, I’m not gonna live that long! I’ll be dead, twice over, by then’.”
He grins. “It turns out I am – the drug addict has died, the womaniser has died. And somehow this shell, gasping but somehow still alive, is here.”
‘Arthur’ is released on April 22
Russell Brand: the womaniser and drug addict in me has died
Gone are the shock tactics, the womanising, even the sleeping pills. An altogether more family-friendly Russell Brand talks Katy Perry, 'Arthur' and his changed ways
Craig McLean
9 Apr 2011
telegraph.co.uk[/align]
Onto the set of Saturday Night Live stalks lanky Russell Brand, all teeth and hair and limbs, clean-shaven and big-jawed and tight-trousered. “Don’t be alarmed,” he tells the excitable, eager-to-whoop audience, “I’ve not come here to levy unreasonable taxes.” Then, pausing only to grin nervously, the 35-year-old comedian, writer and newly minted film star adds, “I’m much more famous in England.”
It’s eight o’clock on a February evening in New York. Britain’s newest international star is getting stuck into the dress rehearsal for the latest episode of America’s long-running television comedy institution. Every week the show has a guest celebrity host and this week it’s Brand’s turn.
“In the pursuit of success,” he will say later, “whatever trade you’re in, you’re always looking for recognisable landmarks. Yeah, right, I’ve been on the cover of Rolling Stone, I've been in The Simpsons, I've hosted Saturday Night Live.” This statement, it will transpire, is typical Brand: enumerating – bragging about – his own achievements, yet also managing to appear giddy with childlike chuffedness at his own good fortune rather than come over like an insufferable, blowhard ego-monster.
Analysing and dissecting this stuff is almost his stock-in-trade. Over the last year he’s been filming a documentary, The Big I Am. Like his two bestselling autobiographies, Booky Wook and Booky Wook 2, it explores fame, and his pursuit of love and experience of it.
Brand opens Saturday Night Live with a short stand-up routine. A veteran of “hundreds and hundreds” of comedy gigs in grotty pubs, insalubrious back rooms and the Edinburgh Festival Fringe – as well as many hours of live television, hosting things like Big Brother’s Little Brother – this is his comfort zone. As he’s always done, this only child of a single-parent mother talks about himself, and he talks about his life.
But whereas previously his life in London was a carousel of drug and alcohol-crazed womanising – then, post-rehab, sober womanising – and self-made scandal, his new existence is very different. Now he lives in Los Angeles with his wife, American pop star Katy Perry. After eight years of sobriety, he practises yoga and Transcendental Meditation. Such is his new-found Hollywood “clout”, he has films made around his character (Get Him To The Greek), is able to have other films greenlit (the forthcoming remake of Arthur), and is probably going to be making a film with Tom Cruise (Rock Of Ages, an adaptation of the Broadway musical).
As an expat, he tells the SNL audience, he now feels very patriotic. “Colin Firth is the new Diana!” he says by way of explaining his teary love of The King’s Speech. Then he talks a little about life chez Perry-Brand. It’s great, and it’s ordinary, and it’s great that it’s ordinary. Now his “problems” are things like Perry blithely telling him she’s lent his car to her brother. And now, when someone rings the doorbell at the home in Los Angeles that Brand bought for $3.25million in December 2009, his immediate thought process is no longer “doorbell, police, raid, sniffer dogs, flush drugs!”
“I had to address my Englishness, address the way I dress, address the biggest thing in the room – that I’m married to a pop star,” he reflects later. “And people liked it, and I was happy. I thought it was sweet and nice. I also thought it was professional. That’s what I should do in that situation,” says the man still infamous for the 2008 “Sachsgate” scandal that led to him being sacked from BBC Radio 2.
In some ways LA-living, Hollywood-endorsed, happily married Brand is, it seems, all grown up. But it’s not come without some effort. “I’ve got a default setting of being mischievous,” he acknowledges. “If I’m tired, for example, I’ll gravitate towards comedy about sex or shocking stuff. So I have to really focus and be diligent ’cause that’s only a small fraction of who I am, and it’s a bit lazy sometimes. It’s a bit of a tick, a go-to place.”
His funniest SNL sketch has Brand playing an old wizard who visits a young girl in her room at Dreary Wick Orphanage. It’s full of innuendo, albeit innuendo emanating from the (adult) actress playing the girl. Yet the sketch is not used in the final show. “It was good, wasn’t it?” he says afterwards. “It was a bit edgy for them – they would have left it in. But it was…”
Creepy? “Exactly. I thought to myself: ‘I’ve got Arthur coming out in a month, I’ve got Hop, a kids cartoon movie, out a week before that. I have played the sex and drug card pretty strongly for quite a while! So now I don’t need to telegraph that.
“I feel like you have to eventually become aware of what it is you’re trying to present. And you can regard that as cynical, but I just think, I’m doing this and I wanna be successful. I want people to see the films I’m doing.”
It was, in the end, Brand’s decision to scrap the wizard. “Although it was a good sketch for me, I thought overall…” You’d take a longer view? “Exactly,” says the comedian who for so long lived in and traded on the short, sharp, shock. “That’s what I’m trying to do now.”
A few weeks later, I catch up with Brand again. We meet at Heathrow airport one Friday afternoon, sit opposite each other on a flight to Cologne – his 6ft 9in Essex bodyguard between us – then are met by dedicated airport staff at the other end. They usher us through security. Then we travel in to the hotel where we’re all staying. Then, a couple of hours after landing, after he’s put in some gym time, Brand and I meet in the hotel bar.
This is how things have to be with him and his schedule these days. He’d flown into Heathrow from LA that same day, and was travelling on to Cologne to meet “the wife” – Perry’s 10-month California Dreams world tour was playing the German city. Being apart, travelling, “is a good way of…” he begins – Brand has a huge and ornate vocabulary – “solipsistic meme quotidian complicité”.
He loves the sound of words and crafting baroque sentences. But he also talks very fast, one thought falling over another, and he often leaves sentences unfinished. “It makes me appreciate it,” he continues, meaning he and Perry’s relationship, “and keeps it kind of exciting.”
What did he make of the media reports that their five-month-old marriage (they wed in India, a year on from meeting at the MTV Video Music Awards, which Brand hosted) was already in “crisis”, and that they were in couple’s counselling?
“One of the most significant achievements of mine over the last six months is that I don’t look on Google any more. I’m over six months Google clean,” grins the former addict. “So I don’t have any interaction with [those rumours]. At all. It’s a really, really normal marriage. But yeah, I did hear that one about the counselling. But I have a really healthy attitude towards that stuff now – I can’t control what people say. I have now, for the first time ever, a domestic private life, and I’m happy with it. We’re managing it really well at the moment, I’m really proud of it as a simple, healthy, fun relationship.”
Hence him Tweeting a picture of Perry first thing in the morning, head on the pillow and face make-up free? “I didn’t mean to do that!” he insists. “I was mucking around. She took a photo of me and went, ‘I’m gonna put that on Twitter…’ So I took a photo of her. But I went further and I clicked on the Twitter thing. I thought I had successfully deleted it – but I sent it to two million people.”
Was she annoyed? “She was for a moment, but she’s all right about it. But I don’t think any woman likes to be so exposed without make-up to millions of people. But I should tell her, ‘People like that photo, it’s humanised you’,” he jokes. ‘“You’ve a whole new audience out there’.”
He hasn’t seen the trailer for the Smurfs movie due to be released this summer, in which Perry voices the only female Smurf, Smurfette. One scene has Smurfette evoking Marilyn Monroe’s billowing dress scene from The Seven Year Itch. So that’s his wife’s character – coquettish Smurf. “Yeah, makes sense,” he shoots back. “Good casting.”
Perry comes offstage and rings him just as our interview is finishing, around midnight. He’s to meet her in the underground car park, and together they will travel on to the hotel where, it transpires, he’s actually staying.
“You get used to it,” he says of his heavy flying schedule. He managed to sleep fine on the overnight transatlantic flight. Did he take a sleeping pill? “Mother’s little helper? Nah, I can’t fuck around with all that.” Not even prescription ones? “Especially not those. I’d start taking ’em every day.”
We talk about Arthur, a remake of the 1981 comedy which had Dudley Moore in the title role, Liza Minnelli as his true love interest, and John Gielgud playing his faithful butler. In the new version, the butler is Helen Mirren, but Arthur is still a boozy English billionaire trying to duck an arranged marriage in favour of a girl from the wrong side of the tracks.
“Arthur is a sweet and charming bon viveur, but also kind of loving. The line from the original that really resonated with me is when Gielgud goes to visit Minnelli, and she goes: ‘Did Arthur send you here?’ He goes, ‘No, Arthur is far too fine a person to be involved in anything as tawdry as this.’ It made me think of the British aristocracy’s traditional role as stalwarts of decency. They would have led the line in battle. Along with their privilege came duty.
“So I tried to play Arthur in that way. Even though he’s a billionaire, he loves people, he sees good in people. He wants them to have fun, and is joyous. So that for me was very attractive. And obviously as well, it made Dudley Moore a superstar. So it's an unbelievable opportunity really,” he adds in typical straight-talking style.
Brand doesn’t do coy, or faux humility. His ambition is his rocket-fuel, and whereas before that occasionally landed him in trouble, now it keeps him on the straight and narrow. As someone who’s stared into the toilet bowl of drug-fuelled madness, what does Brand make of Charlie Sheen’s current situation? “Well, actually, it’s something that I’m quite cautious about. Because I don’t think it’s a subject for entertainment. And I always wouldn’t want to be judgemental in any way.
“I’ve spoken to him a few times, you can tell he’s just a brilliant, smart bloke. And evidently, from the tests he’s had, he’s not taking drugs [any more]. But it’s gonna take him a while. And he’s burning AA books – he’s really not up for [rehab]. But,” he adds, “he’s in the right place – if he sorts himself out, he’ll be OK. Because Hollywood redeems.”
Has Perry been Brand’s redemption? It seems that way. After years of mind-boggling womanising – Booky Wook 2 begins with a very funny account of his relationship with Kate Moss – Brand has settled down. Did meeting Perry suddenly shut off his wild-oats urges? “Yeah, it was like that,” he admits. For one thing, for the first time he had “parity” with a woman. Previously his fame and celebrity “imbalanced” all his relationships. He describes the manner of his meeting Perry as “phenomenal”.
“The night before I went on my first date with her I was living my old life! Close one door because new people were coming in. And from then to now, I’ve grasped this tendril and been on that since.” Was it a surprise to him, that his oversexualised tap could be turned off so suddenly? “It’s been extraordinary,” he nods. “I’m still surprised by it – surprised that I’m here in Cologne to meet my wife, get to spend a couple of days with her…Ten years ago my life was so far away from this people just wouldn’t have said this would happen to me. Except for me – I was the only person who thought it was possible. And much as I wanted to be successful, I wanted to have a partner and a family. There were long periods amid my single life where I’d think, ‘It’d be good to have a mate’.
“There was one particular occasion when I was staying in some country hotel and I was watching Watership Down. And looking at the fields in it, I turned to the girl I was with and said, ‘Oh look, that’s like that walk we went on yesterday.’ And as I was saying it I was thinking, ‘Oh f, that wasn’t her. That was Yesterday Girl!’” He grins sheepishly at his own, well, awfulness.
“So there was no development. And as well as there being no development in the relationships, there was no development in me. I just skimmed along the surface of stuff for a very long while, and never had a chance to go deeper.”
Yes, he says, they both want children, and he admits he hankers after a return to Britain. “I secretly want to do that. I have a fear of hearing my American children speak to me in American accents.”
Would Perry be up for that? “I’m sure I can sell her Great Britain on some level. The Cotswolds — people seem to be up for that don’t they? Stone-walled cottage…” But in the meantime there’s a Hollywood career to take care of. This summer Brand will either be filming a film called Bad Father, or another with the working title of West Texas United. In the latter he would play a former West Ham footballer – Brand is a Hammers fan – who pitches up in the Lone Star State to teach soccer to local kids. “It’s about squandering greatness,” he says.
The film with Cruise would be more of a stretch for his still-nascent acting skills. He’s been offered the film – no audition required – and he’s confident it’ll happen. But still: is there a bit of him going “bloody hell, I’m a goon from Grays in Essex – and I’m about to work with Tom Cruise?”
“Yeah, there is, there is,” he says thoughtfully. “It doesn’t seem fully real. But it happens by increments. If someone had said when I was doing Bugsy Malone at Grays School, ‘You wanna do a movie with Tom Cruise?’, I’d have gone, ‘When?’ And they’d have gone, ‘In 20 years!’ “I’d be like, I’m not gonna live that long! I’ll be dead, twice over, by then’.”
He grins. “It turns out I am – the drug addict has died, the womaniser has died. And somehow this shell, gasping but somehow still alive, is here.”
‘Arthur’ is released on April 22
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Russell Brand - Piers Morgan's Life Stories
This was on this evening and is well worth a watch if you've enjoyed his carry-on over the past few years
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Russell Brand - Piers Morgan's Life Stories
This was on this evening and is well worth a watch if you've enjoyed his carry-on over the past few years
[/align]
Last edited by faceless on Tue Jan 27, 2015 3:41 am, edited 5 times in total.
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Russell Brand gets late night comedy show on FX
Camille Mann [/align]
Russell Brand will be hosting his own late night TV comedy show on the FX network, starting later this year, according to FX. The show is set to be shot in front of a live audience and is said to take on topics including politics, news and pop culture. The show has yet to be titled, reports Reuters.
"We're very excited to add Russell Brand's bracingly funny, original, and honest voice to the FX comedy line-up," said Nick Grad, original programming chief at FX.
Russell Brand gets late night comedy show on FX
Camille Mann [/align]
Russell Brand will be hosting his own late night TV comedy show on the FX network, starting later this year, according to FX. The show is set to be shot in front of a live audience and is said to take on topics including politics, news and pop culture. The show has yet to be titled, reports Reuters.
"We're very excited to add Russell Brand's bracingly funny, original, and honest voice to the FX comedy line-up," said Nick Grad, original programming chief at FX.
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Drug addiction - an illness not a crime, says Russell Brand
Drug addiction should be treated as a potentially fatal illness and not a crime, comedian Russell Brand has told a parliamentary select committee.
24 Apr 2012
telegraph.co.uk[/align]
The flamboyant film star and comedian said drug addicts should not be put on methadone for years at a time, written off and left on the sidelines of society. He also called for possession of drugs to be decriminalised.
Abstinence-based recovery for addicts would help "neutralise the toxic social threat they pose as criminals", he said. Society should not just "discard people, write them off on methadone and leave them on the sidelines", he added. Brand also said he would back decriminalisation of possession of drugs, adding that there was "a degree of cowardice and wilful ignorance around this condition".
He said: "I'm not a legal expert. I'm saying that, to a drug addict, the legal aspect is irrelevant. If you need to get drugs, you will. The criminal and legal status, I think, sends the wrong message. Being arrested isn't a lesson, it's just an administrative blip." He added that he was not telling people not to take drugs if it was causing no harm but said he wanted to see more funding for abstinence-based recovery.
Brand said he became addicted to drugs because of emotional and psychological difficulties, adding "it was rough". The star, who said he had beaten a heroin addiction which saw him arrested a dozen times, was giving evidence to MPs reviewing the Government's drugs strategy.
Brand, who arrived at the hearing wearing a black hat, gold chains and crosses and a torn black vest top, said he was not calling for "a free-for-all where everyone goes around taking drugs". Instead, he said addiction should be treated as an illness and society should recognise that addicts, with the proper help, can become active and useful members. Asked if there should be a carrot-and-stick approach, he said it should be more about "love and compassion".
Speaking rapidly and addressing committee members by their first names, Brand dismissed suggestions that addicts cared where their drugs came from or the consequences of their production. "I don't think they're going to be affected by that because they're normally on drugs," he said. Asked about the role of celebrities, he said: "Who cares about bloody celebrities?" Brand said that, instead, he wanted to offer people "truth and authenticity".
During the lively and energetic 30-minute hearing, Brand also addressed MPs as "mate" and, when pushed for time by chairman Keith Vaz, replied: "Time is infinite. We can't run out of time. Who's next? Theresa May? She may not turn up. Ask her if she knows what day it is."
Members of the public packed the hearing room to hear Brand's evidence. When Labour MP David Winnick told Brand the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee was not a variety show, Brand replied: "You're providing a little bit of variety though, making it more like Dad's Army."
Chip Somers, chief executive of the detox centre Focus 12 where Brand sought help with drug dependency, said: "Just to park people on methadone for four to seven years is criminal." Abstinence was an "admirable aim for everybody", he said, but he admitted that not everyone would achieve it. "I don't think methadone is a good thing." He added he thought many methadone users were also using other drugs.
Both Brand and Mr Somers said the number of people criminalised for possession should be reduced.
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Drug addiction - an illness not a crime, says Russell Brand
Drug addiction should be treated as a potentially fatal illness and not a crime, comedian Russell Brand has told a parliamentary select committee.
24 Apr 2012
telegraph.co.uk[/align]
The flamboyant film star and comedian said drug addicts should not be put on methadone for years at a time, written off and left on the sidelines of society. He also called for possession of drugs to be decriminalised.
Abstinence-based recovery for addicts would help "neutralise the toxic social threat they pose as criminals", he said. Society should not just "discard people, write them off on methadone and leave them on the sidelines", he added. Brand also said he would back decriminalisation of possession of drugs, adding that there was "a degree of cowardice and wilful ignorance around this condition".
He said: "I'm not a legal expert. I'm saying that, to a drug addict, the legal aspect is irrelevant. If you need to get drugs, you will. The criminal and legal status, I think, sends the wrong message. Being arrested isn't a lesson, it's just an administrative blip." He added that he was not telling people not to take drugs if it was causing no harm but said he wanted to see more funding for abstinence-based recovery.
Brand said he became addicted to drugs because of emotional and psychological difficulties, adding "it was rough". The star, who said he had beaten a heroin addiction which saw him arrested a dozen times, was giving evidence to MPs reviewing the Government's drugs strategy.
Brand, who arrived at the hearing wearing a black hat, gold chains and crosses and a torn black vest top, said he was not calling for "a free-for-all where everyone goes around taking drugs". Instead, he said addiction should be treated as an illness and society should recognise that addicts, with the proper help, can become active and useful members. Asked if there should be a carrot-and-stick approach, he said it should be more about "love and compassion".
Speaking rapidly and addressing committee members by their first names, Brand dismissed suggestions that addicts cared where their drugs came from or the consequences of their production. "I don't think they're going to be affected by that because they're normally on drugs," he said. Asked about the role of celebrities, he said: "Who cares about bloody celebrities?" Brand said that, instead, he wanted to offer people "truth and authenticity".
During the lively and energetic 30-minute hearing, Brand also addressed MPs as "mate" and, when pushed for time by chairman Keith Vaz, replied: "Time is infinite. We can't run out of time. Who's next? Theresa May? She may not turn up. Ask her if she knows what day it is."
Members of the public packed the hearing room to hear Brand's evidence. When Labour MP David Winnick told Brand the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee was not a variety show, Brand replied: "You're providing a little bit of variety though, making it more like Dad's Army."
Chip Somers, chief executive of the detox centre Focus 12 where Brand sought help with drug dependency, said: "Just to park people on methadone for four to seven years is criminal." Abstinence was an "admirable aim for everybody", he said, but he admitted that not everyone would achieve it. "I don't think methadone is a good thing." He added he thought many methadone users were also using other drugs.
Both Brand and Mr Somers said the number of people criminalised for possession should be reduced.
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Russell speaks more about addiction in this extended interview with John Snow at Channel 4 News.
https://www.channel4.com/news/russell-br ... yoga-video
https://www.channel4.com/news/russell-br ... yoga-video
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SquareEyes
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He seems to be winning round a lot of people lately - the lad done good!
Here he is on Steve Wright this afternoon. He's also on Jonathan Ross tomorrow night so I'll try to grab that too.
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Here he is on Steve Wright this afternoon. He's also on Jonathan Ross tomorrow night so I'll try to grab that too.
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Russell Brand - 2013-02-02 - Jonathan Ross[/align]
Russell Brand - 2013-02-02 - Jonathan Ross[/align]
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Russell Brand - 2013-02-04 - Howard Stern[/align]
Russell Brand - 2013-02-04 - Howard Stern[/align]
Last edited by faceless on Tue Jun 18, 2013 2:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Russell Brand - 2013-03-05 - This Morning[/align]
Russell Brand - 2013-03-05 - This Morning[/align]