russell brand interviewed by jeremy paxman!
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Confessions of a randy dandy (Russell Brand features)
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
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 gets late night comedy show on FX
Camille Mann
"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.
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
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.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
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.
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Russell Brand and the GQ awards: 'It's amazing how absurd it seems'
The comedian on his evening at the GQ awards, from which he was ejected after cracking a joke about sponsor Hugo Boss
Russell Brand
The Guardian,
13 September 2013
It must have been a while since I've attended a fancy, glitzy event because as soon as I got to the GQ awards I felt like something was up. The usual visual grammar was in place – a carpet in the street, people in paddocks awaiting a brush with something glamorous, blokes with earpieces, birds in frocks of colliding colours that if sighted in nature would indicate the presence of poison. I'm not trying to pass myself off as some kind of Francis of Assisi, Yusuf Islam, man of the people, but I just wasn't feeling it. I ambled into the Opera House across yet more outdoor carpets, boards bearing branding, in this case Hugo Boss, past paparazzi, and began to queue up at the line of journalists and presenters, in a slightly nicer paddock who offer up mics and say stuff like: "Who are you wearing?" "I'm not wearing anyone, I went with clobber, I'm not Buffalo Bill."
Noel Gallagher was immediately ahead of me in the press line and he's actually a mate. I mean I love him, sometimes I forget he wrote Supersonic and played to 400,000 people at Knebworth because he's such a laugh. He laid right into me, the usual gear: "What the fook you wearing? Does Rod Stewart know you're going through his jumble?" I try to remain composed and give as good as I get, even though the paddock-side banter is accompanied by looming foam tipped eavesdroppers, hanging like insidious mistletoe.
In case you don't know these parties aren't like real parties. It's fabricated fun, imposed from the outside. A vision of what squares imagine cool people might do set on a spaceship. Or in Moloko. As we come out of the lift there's a bloody great long corridor flanked by gorgeous birds in black dresses, paid to be there, motionless, left hand on hip, teeth tacked to lips with scarlet glue. The intention I suppose is to contrive some Ian Fleming super-uterus of well fit mannequins to midwife you into the shindig, but me and my mate Matt just felt self-conscious, jigging through Robert Palmer's oestrogen passage like aspirational Morris dancers. Matt stared at their necks and I made small talk as I hot stepped towards the preshow drinks. Now I'm not typically immune to the allure of objectified women but I am presently beleaguered by a nerdish, whirling dervish and am eschewing all others. Perhaps the clarity of this elation has awakened me. A friend of mine said, "Being in love is like discovering a concealed ballroom in a house you've long inhabited." I also don't drink so these affairs where most people rinse away their Britishness and twitishness with booze are for me a face-first log flume of backslaps, chitchat, eyewash and gak.
After a load of photos and what-not, we descend the world's longest escalator, which are called that even as they de-escalate, and in we go to the main forum, a high ceilinged hall, full of circular cloth-draped, numbered tables, a stage at the front, the letters GQ, 12-foot high in neon at the back; this aside though, neon forever the moniker of trash, this is a posh do, in an opera house full of folk in tuxes.
Everywhere you look there's someone off the telly; Stephen Fry, Pharrell, Sir Bobby Charlton, Samuel L Jackson, Rio Ferdinand, Justin Timberlake, foreign secretary William Hague and mayor of London Boris Johnson. My table is sanctuary of sorts; Noel and his missus Sara, John Bishop and his wife Mel, my mates Matt Morgan, Mick and Gee. Noel and I are both there to get awards and decide to use our speeches to dig each other out. This makes me feel a little grounded in the unreal glare, normal.
Noel's award is for being an "icon" and mine for being an "oracle". My knowledge of the classics is limited but includes awareness that an oracle is a spiritual medium through whom prophecies from the gods were sought in ancient Greece. Thankfully, I have a sense of humour that prevents me from taking accolades of that nature on face value or I'd've been in the tricky position of receiving the GQ award for being "best portal to a mystical dimension", which is a lot of pressure. Me, Matt and Noel conclude it's probably best to treat the whole event as a bit of a laugh and, as if to confirm this as the correct attitude, Boris Johnson – a man perpetually in pajamas regardless of what he's wearing – bounds to the stage to accept the award for "best politician". Yes, we agree, this is definitely a joke.
Boris, it seems, is taking it in this spirit, joshing beneath his ever-redeeming barnet that Labour's opposition to military action in Syria is a fey stance that he, as GQ politician of the year, would never be guilty of.
Matt is momentarily focused. "He's making light of gassed Syrian children," he says. We watch, slightly aghast, then return to goading Noel. Before long John Bishop is on stage giving me a lovely introduction so I get up as Noel hurls down a few gauntlets, daring me to "do my worst". I thanked John, said "the oracle award" sounds like a made-up prize you'd give a fat kid on sports day – I should know, I used to get them – then that it's barmy that Hugo Boss can trade under the same name they flogged uniforms to the Nazis under and the ludicrous necessity for an event such as this one to banish such a lurid piece of information from our collective consciousness.
I could see the room dividing as I spoke. I could hear the laughter of some and louder still silence of others. I realised that for some people this was regarded as an event with import. The magazine, the sponsors and some of those in attendance saw it as a kind of ceremony that warranted respect. In effect it is a corporate ritual, an alliance between a media organisation, GQ and a commercial entity, Hugo Boss. What dawned on me as the night went on is that even in apparently frivolous conditions the establishment asserts control and won't tolerate having that assertion challenged, even flippantly, by that most beautifully adept tool, comedy.
The jokes about Hugo Boss were not intended to herald a campaign to destroy them, they're not Monsanto or Halliburton, the contemporary corporate allies of modern-day fascism; they are, I thought, an irrelevant menswear supplier with a double-dodgy history. The evening though provided an interesting opportunity to see how power structures preserve their agenda, even in a chintzy microcosm.
Subsequent to my jokes, the evening took a peculiar turn. Like the illusion of sophistication had been inadvertently disrupted by the exposure. It had the vibe of a wedding dinner where the best man's speech had revealed the groom's infidelity. With Hitler.
Foreign secretary William Hague gave an award to former Telegraph editor Charles Moore, for writing a hagiography of Margaret Thatcher, who used his acceptance speech to build a precarious connection between my comments about the sponsors, my foolish answerphone scandal at the BBC and the Sachs family's flight, 70 years earlier from Nazi-occupied Europe. It was a confusing tapestry that Moore spun but he seemed to be saying that a) the calls were as bad as the Holocaust and b) the Sachs family may not've sought refuge in Britain had they known what awaited them. Even for a man whose former job was editing the Telegraph this is an extraordinary way to manipulate information.
Noel, who is not one to sit quietly on his feelings, literally booed while Charles Moore was talking and others joined in. Booing! When do you hear booing in this day and age other than pantomimes and parliament? Hague and Johnson are equally at home in either (Widow Twanky and Buttons, obviously) so were not unduly ruffled, but I thought it was nuts. The room by now had a distinct feel of "us and them" and if there is a line drawn in the sand I don't ever want to find myself on the same side as Hague and Johnson. Up went Noel to garner his gong and he did not disappoint: "Always nice to be invited to the Tory party conference," he began, "Good to see the foreign secretary present when there's shit kicking off in Syria."
Noel once expressed his disgust at seeing a politician at Glastonbury. "What are you doing here? This ain't for you," he'd said. He explained to me: "You used to know where you were with politicians in the 70s and 80s cos they all looked like nutters; Thatcher, Heseltine, Cyril Smith. Now they look normal, they're more dangerous." Then with dreadful foreboding, "They move among us." I agree with Noel. What are politicians doing at Glastonbury and the GQ awards? I feel guilty going and I'm a comedian. Why are public officials, paid by us, turning up at events for fashion magazines? Well the reason I was there was because I have a tour on and I was advised it would be good publicity. What are the politicians selling? How are they managing our perception of them with their attendance of these sequin-encrusted corporate balls?
We witness that there is a relationship between government, media and industry that is evident even at this most spurious and superficial level. These three institutions support one another. We know that however cool a media outlet may purport to be, their primary loyalty is to their corporate backers. We know also that you cannot criticise the corporate backers openly without censorship and subsequent manipulation of this information.
Now I'm aware that this was really no big deal; I'm not saying I'm an estuary Che Guevara, it was a daft joke, by a daft comic at a daft event. It makes me wonder though how the relationships and power dynamics I witnessed on this relatively inconsequential context are replicated on a more significant scale.
For example, if you can't criticise Hugo Boss at the GQ awards because they own the event do you think it is significant that energy companies donate to the Tory party? Will that affect government policy? Will the relationships that "politician of the year" Boris Johnson has with City bankers – he took many more meetings with them than public servants in his first term as mayor – influence the way he runs our capital?
Is it any wonder that Amazon, Vodafone and Starbucks avoid paying tax when they enjoy such cosy relationships with members of our government?
Ought we be concerned that our rights to protest are being continually eroded under the guise of enhancing our safety? Is there a relationship between proposed fracking in the UK, new laws that prohibit protest and the relationships between energy companies and our government?
I don't know. I do have some good principles picked up that night that are generally applicable; the glamour and the glitz isn't real, the party isn't real, you have a much better time mucking around trying to make your mates laugh. I suppose that's obvious, we all know it, we already know all the important stuff like: don't trust politicians, don't trust big business and don't trust the media. Trust your own heart and each another. When you take a breath and look away from the spectacle it's amazing how absurd it seems when you look back.
Last edited by faceless on Fri Nov 29, 2013 7:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Tally ho! The elite’s new blood sport: Russell Brand hunting
An excellent article about the sneering wankers of the middle-class media and their reactions to Russell's positions.
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