Is Russell Brand Out Of His F**King Mind?

Russell Brand is dancing around maniacally, lifting his shirt with one hand to allow himself to better twiddle his nipples with the other, singing, and occasionally rubbing his crotch through his silk pants, oblivious to the fact that he’s about to derail the world’s most influential TV network, one of Britain’s highest paid TV personalities, and, potentially, his own career.

Nor, for that matter, do any of us sitting on the other side of some soundproof glass in the control room of a tiny Radio 2 studio in the British Broadcasting Corporation building, in Central London: An engineer, producer Nic Philps, myself, and Brand’s consort (she prefers “friend”), a statuesque young woman who could have just stepped off a runway.

Brand is prerecording his weekly show with guest co-host Jonathan Ross, 48, who is one of the U.K.’s most well-known entertainers and, in addition to having his own program on Radio 2, also hosts one of the nation’s most popular TV chat shows, Tonight with Jonathan Ross, on BBC1 (his three-year contract is worth £18 million, almost $35 million). It was on this show that Brand made one of his earliest high-profile public appearances, in 2006, and he and Ross have been friends ever since.

Philps tries to call the 78-year-old actor Andrew Sachs (known for his role as John Cleese’s comic sidekick Manuel in the classic British comedy Fawlty Towers), for a scheduled interview. While the phone is ringing, Brand says, “The elephant in the room is, what Andrew doesn’t know is, I’ve slept with his granddaughter!” Philps transfers the call from the control room to the studio, but it goes to voicemail. Ross and Brand leave a long-winded joking message, then Ross blurts out, “He fucked your granddaughter!”
There are gasps of disbelief in the control room, then everyone bursts out laughing.

“Are you going to be able to use that?” I ask Philps.

Still laughing, he replies, “We’re definitely going to try.”

Brand actually had slept with the girl in question, and after Ross’s comment, Philps tries to call the actor back four times, each time transferring the call to the studio so the presenters can leave messages. At one point, Brand bursts into a song of mock apology, which includes the lines, “I said some things I didn’t have oughta/ Like I had sex with your granddaughter,” (those in the control room are clearly impressed with his improvisational abilities). During another call he exclaims, “I used a condom!”

When the show eventually airs, four days later, with the comedians’ comments left intact, a firestorm of public outcry will explode, fanned by certain newspapers in the U.K.; an independent agency will launch a full-scale investigation into the incident; the BBC, which is entirely paid for with taxpayers’ money, will announce plans to totally overhaul its censorship procedures; the director of Radio 2 will quit, after a 25-year career; Brand will resign from the BBC; Ross will be suspended without pay, pending further investigation; media outlets that should know better will refer to the incident as “a national crisis.” Meanwhile, the granddaughter in question, Georgina Baillie, 23, will cut short a tour with an incongruously named burlesque dance group, the Satanic Sluts, to return to England and grant interviews to whomever will listen.
Immediately after the show, though, the feeling among those present is that it was a particularly successful one: When Brand strides into the control room afterward, the first thing he asks, to nobody in particular, is “What did you think?” Someone tells him it was a great show. He reaches over and grabs his oversized sunglasses from beside a bank of flashing audio equipment, puts them on, and turns back, saying dramatically, “Yes it was rather, wasn’t it? That’s what happens when Jonathan and I get together—things get craaaazzzzy.” He reaches over and grabs his ladyfriend around the waist, kisses her, and asks if she enjoyed the show, too. “It was hilarious!” she replies. “I didn’t know you could sing like that.”
“Oh I do everything, me,” he says, with faux arrogance. He pulls on a black jacket, then puts his hand on my shoulder: “Come on, Luke,” says Brand, who makes a point of using first names, “lets go home and have some tea and another chat.”

Russell Brand first came to the attention of many in America as eccentric, self-involved rocker Aldous Snow in Nick Stoller’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, in April 2008. He and Jonah Hill, despite having what were essentially supporting roles, all but stole the film—in which Brand plays a slightly more flamboyant version of his already extremely flamboyant self. “He just kicked ass,” says Stoller of auditioning Brand for the film. “He was so funny and interesting and had such a cool screen presence that I had to work with him. He’s got a kind of Johnny Depp presence.” Then MTV asked him to host the Video Music Awards show, which we’ll come to in due course. Though the furor over the radio show is still going strong at press time, it looks unlikely to affect Brand’s current ascension to fame in the U.S. (two days after our interview he will leave for Los Angeles, where he also has a house). This winter, he will appear with Adam Sandler in Disney’s feel-good family movie Bedtime Stories, and early in 2009 he will star in Julie Taymor’s interpretation of The Tempest, in which Prospero is re-imagined as a woman, Prospera, played by Helen Mirren; Alonso is played by Jeremy Irons; Ben Wishaw is Ariel; and Djimon Honsou is Caliban. Brand plays—who else?—Trinculo, the jester. In March he will appear in another Judd Apatow production, Get Him to the Greek. Also directed by Nick Stoller, this film resurrects the character of Aldous Snow, who has now fallen well and truly off the wagon and is the responsibility of Jonah Hill’s Matthew (also brought back from Forgetting Sarah Marshall), who must deliver Snow from London to a concert at the Greek Theater, in L.A.

This is all a lot of significant acting for a man who is most famous in Britain for his stand-up comedy, love of football [soccer] (which he documents in a weekly column for the Guardian—a book of the collected columns, Articles of Faith, is due for release in December), sleeping with lots of women, those pants—tight and silky—and that hair—long and back-combed. He’s also known for being candid about his storied past. But Brand did attend one of the most prestigious drama schools in England, the Italia Conti Academy, and was drawn to acting, he says, early on. During a conversation at his house the day before, he read aloud to me from his autobiography, My Booky Wook, about the first time he was waiting to go onstage, in a school play, as Fat Sam in Bugsy Malone. (Brand, now stick-thin, was a chubby child.) “In a very Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland way, the first time I went onstage, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m home!’ I had an incredibly camp realization that I would never do anything else,” he said. He opened the book, cleared his throat and continued, “These are perhaps the most grandiose terms one could ever imagine,” before beginning:

“It’s like dying and being born and fucking and crying….
You taste your own mouth and feel your own skin….
I’d never been so far away, but I knew I was home....
I knew I’d never leave, and I never have.”

This afternoon, back at his house, he says, “When I did that first school play, I thought, right, what’s the furthest I can take this? I thought, You can become the most identifiable, successful person in the world. You can create your own complete identity. You could work across all media and write books, do radio, do stand-up, perform in films, perform in plays. And I still think I’m trying to fulfill that.” He pauses, and stares out of an open window into his garden, where a drizzle is falling persistently. “Actually, quite early on in that process, I thought, It probably doesn’t matter how famous and successful you get, you’ll still never really be happy because it’s transient and meaningless. All desire is the inappropriate substitute for the desire to be at one with God and to recognize our wholeness.” Somehow, coming from Brand, who delivers such statements with much waving of arms and fluctuation of voice, such grandiloquence seems perfectly normal. “I’m only, just now, thinking about all those things and, what will happen when I can’t make a film or I can’t perform stand-up? Well, then you’ll [he switches often between first and second person] have to attach your success to something valuable just to feel that you’re worthwhile. If you live a devotional life—if I can get beyond the superficial needs and pleasures and thrills, then perhaps something truly wonderful can be achieved.”
All of which, to those familiar with him, is characteristically perfervid stuff from Brand, who is a vegetarian and has devoted one floor of his five-story home to a yoga studio. But, as he lies down horizontally on a black velvet chaise lounge, like a patient preparing for therapy, in the living room (which is decorated with deep purples and black velveteen wallpaper) of his beautiful townhouse in a particularly leafy, idyllic part of Hampstead, North London, and puts his head on a pillow, I suggest that, considering not that many people in the U.S. even know who he is yet, it might be best to start at the beginning.

“Well, I’ve almost got to the point where even the most harrowing incidents have no potency; they’ve been splayed out for public consumption and therapeutic analysis so many times that they seem almost abstract now,” Brand says, staring at the ceiling, his long hair falling off the back of the chaise, almost touching the floor. His father left home when he was six years old, and Brand was raised by his mother in a modest, working-class area in Essex. She had cancer three times before Brand was 17. When he was eight, his stepdad moved in. “He was, in my view, an undiagnosed alcoholic,” says Brand matter-of-factly, “and used to drink superstrength lager like a homeless person night after night, mostly in underpants, remote control resting on thigh.” Brand, an only child, was left very much to his own devices. “I was an unusual, peculiar child,” he says, a touch wistfully but with the pragmatism of someone who’s been over this ground before. “I was very introspective, lost in my imagination and animals. My early life was spent feeling unwanted by my stepdad and being left alone. I think all that kind of formative stuff creates excesses or deficits that, it is commonly believed, you try to address for the rest of your life. So, I suppose the fact that I’ve become a sort of show-off for a living is an indication of how that impacted me.” He sits up slightly to sip from a glass of water, then lies back down, and exhales dramatically. “I left home at 16, then started taking drugs in a very diligent, insidious way. There was never really a time when I took drugs in a recreational way: From the off, it was kind of medicinal and clichéd. And it went from soft drugs to hard drugs over the course of just a shade under a decade.” By the time he was 23, Brand was a full fledged heroin addict. “Mostly, I lived with girls,” he says, of this period. “If I met a girl at a bar and went back to her house, I’d sort of be eyeing it as a prospective tenant. Like, ‘What’s your hot water like?’ ‘What kind of boiler do you have?’ I was always thinking, Can I move in? Another common theme between the ages of 18 and 24 was watching black plastic bin bags full of all my possessions arching out of windows—‘Whoosh! There they go! I guess my tenancy is at an end.’ It was a rakish, vagabondish existence defined by petty criminality—by which I mean shoplifting, fare-evasion, drug-dealing in a very small, unprofitable way. If my memory serves, I was arrested during that period quite a lot, really.”

When he was 15, Brand got into stage school. “A lot of the lads there were gay, and there were just a handful of us that were heterosexual in this environment full of really pretty girls in leotards” (many of whom went on to be successful actors and singers in the U.K.). “Everywhere you looked there were breasts spilling out of Lycra and torn tights across muscular thighs,” he says. “It was just a heavenly place, and I became a proper little pothead and started doing acid. It is pretty funny to think about it today, now knowing how complex and delicate my mind is.” He smiles. “If I ever took LSD again, I would want to be in a clinic with someone there to give me water and wipe my brow.” Brand, who has been entirely clean of all drugs since 2003, grins broadly at the thought. “I am good at transformation—I even did Macbeth!” He stops, pulls his shirt up slightly and runs his fingers over his midriff.

Eventually, Brand was kicked out after being arrested while stealing makeup (white mascara) to prepare for his role in his school’s production of Ben Jonson’s Volpone (“I had to use my one phone call to tell them I’d been arrested and would be late for rehearsal”). He turned instead to stand-up comedy, putting on performances in spaces above pubs with a friend. “I was drinking a lot and crazy, but really driven,” he says. “It was an odd combination. I was self-destructive but I was prepared to photocopy leaflets and book rooms and set up the curtain on stage and get the costumes from secondhand shops. In one respect, I was incredibly disciplined, but on the other I was living like a lunatic, desperately trudging through the rain in London, giving cassette tapes to people.” When things didn’t work out with his partner, Brand went solo—this was six years ago. “This country has very good machinery for stand-up comedy,” he says. “If you’re any good, you will get somewhere.” Sure enough, after winning an open-mic event, he found himself performing in front of 2,000 people at only his seventh gig. Not long after, Brand was spotted by MTV Europe after a show at the Edinburgh Festival and given his own presenting contract with the channel. He still had his drug problem but, all of a sudden, he had the money to fully explore it.

“I was like, ‘Oh my fucking God! Wheeee!’ I just went nuts. I sought out crack and heroin dealers. I thought, Fuck this marijuana-and-amphetamines lifestyle, that’s finished. So I became a real drug addict overnight. Taking and scoring drugs with homeless people was inescapable and somehow entrenched in me. I was just given more utensils to be self-destructive with. I went balmy. I did loads of heroin, loads of crack. I was traveling around smuggling drugs up my ass through necessity: I was an oozing mess of existence. My friend Matt would just watch me nodding over foil and say, ‘Oh, he’ll be dead soon.’” On September 12, 2001, Brand went into work dressed as Osama bin Laden and was fired. Shortly after, he was also fired from his radio show on London’s XFM when he brought homeless people into the studio and read pornographic material on air. “Everything just fell apart,” he says. “My manager brought in a drugs expert and he said, ‘If you don’t stop and come into treatment now you’ll be dead or in the hospital, or in prison, within six months. You’re heading toward a meltdown.’ That’s how it was for me: scoring in crack houses, hanging out in brothels, scoring drugs with desperate, desperate people. It was only a matter of time. I was very, very lucky.” Today, Brand is a spokesperson for the organization that helped to rehabilitate him, Focus 12. “I learned you have to surround yourself with people you love,” he says. “You need to have people around you that care about you. Prior to that [intervention], people would have happily watched as I destroyed myself, as long as I was coming out with the goods. Like in drama school, people didn’t care that I was slashing myself, taking loads of drugs and smashing things, and making people cry, just as long as when I got onstage what I did was good and interesting. But the second you aren’t good onstage, you’re fucked. They don’t care about you, they care about the commodity, the end product.”

Once he got clean, Brand became a celebrity in the U.K. very quickly. He was a fixture at awards shows, presenting some and disrupting others. (When Bob Geldof called him a “cunt” during one such show, the NME Awards, in 2006, Brand came back onstage and said, “No wonder Bob Geldof is such an expert on famine. He’s been dining out on ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ for 30 years.”) His look, that of a modern-day libertine (only with more eyeliner and fewer powdered wigs) rapidly became familiar—the tight trousers and big hair cutting a unique figure that is deliberately constructed. “The way I look is representative of the way I am,” he says, this afternoon wearing the same ruched, skin-tight silk pants he was wearing yesterday, and a long-sleeved black top open at the front to reveal a lot of necklaces and a lot of chest hair. “Matt Groening said when he was designing The Simpsons, ‘All the good cartoon characters are identifiable in silhouette.’”
“The fucking guy wears crazy shit and he doesn’t care what any judgmental assholes, such as myself, think about it,” says Jonah Hill. “I watched TV with the guy at his house. He didn’t have ‘hanging out, watching TV’ shit on. He didn’t change into basketball shorts and a T-shirt. He wears his crazy Russell shit when he’s watching Friends on the couch.”

In 2004, Brand started presenting a segment of Big Brother and got his own radio show on BBC Radio 2 in 2006. “When I do something for a Radio 2 show, they give me as much freedom as possible—there’s no radio show like it in terms of what they let me get away with and how much they let me do,” he says today, four days before the program he recorded with Ross will air. “That radio show is really shambolic and honest, but it’s on the BBC, so you have to moderate it to a point. Everything I write and do to one degree or another is censored and controlled.” It didn’t take long for Brand to be noticed in America.

In summer 2008, when he was announced as the host of one of the biggest television events of the year, the VMAs—and the channel began running teaser ads featuring him, Britney, and an elephant—Brand really began to get a buzz about him in the U.S. The show itself received mixed reviews, with Brand delivering a polarizing performance in which he infuriated the more conservative viewers (he has said he’s received death threats) with jokes about George Bush (he called him a “retarded cowboy” who “couldn’t be trusted with a pair of scissors”), the Jonas Brothers (he suggested they’d be better off wearing their promise rings on their penises), and an earnest plea, early in his opening monologue, for Americans to elect Obama (many cheered, but some, including Britney, who in 2003 said, “We should just trust our President,” sat quietly).

“You know, I’m old enough and experienced enough to recognize that it’s all sort of nonsense and meaningless in one way,” Brand says. “I really enjoyed it, in retrospect, and am glad I did it, but it was really challenging for me. What’s my truthful reaction to it...?” he trails off and plays with his hair. “It’s very odd. Stand-up comedy for me is about authenticity and expressing truth and, obviously, the VMAs are not about that. What is difficult is being essential and truthful to yourself while being in that situation, so that was really hard.” On the backlash to his performance, he says: “I look kind of unusual and I said some things that, while innocuous to me, were incendiary to the right-wing, Christian, Republican people. And I’ve always thought, if ever you’re attacked by anyone, look at the person who is attacking you,” he says, readjusting himself on the chaise lounge. “And for me, that was a very moderate, controlled performance,” he continues. “If I was not the kind of guy that Googled myself, I would’ve had no idea that [negative reaction] had happened. But because I am that kind of person—and this is something I should look at—I know pretty much everything everyone has ever said about me, and very little else. But I contextualized it…. Two days later I had to do a press day for Disney’s Bedtime Stories, and Disney owns the Jonas Brothers, and they were still like, ‘Go do your press.’ So that was the first indicator that this was just some noise.”

I ask Brand how he has managed to maintain a good relationship with the notoriously vehement British press. “I’ve been transparent about my inner self,” he says. “I was a drug addict, I like sleeping with girls. I’m not a cartoon lothario or a preening wild man at the expense of all else. I feel like my intentions are good and that, on some level, people know that.” He’s also very honest about his overtly sexual nature. “There are parts of masculinity that are accessible to me,” he says. “I’m socially dominant. I’m sexually confident. I’m intellectually lucid. I’m comfortable with myself. I’m comfortable around my own gender. I’m comfortable around the opposite sex. When people talk about me being obsessed with sex…well, look out of your fucking window. Look at the way every single product is advertised. Look at the way people socialize. Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, sex!”

“Underneath all the hair and clothes and persona, Russell is a remarkably intelligent and hilarious guy,” says Hill. “If you get rid of all the bells and whistles, the guy is an insanely talented writer and performer. And that’s what should be the most appealing thing of all.”

“You know, I think you can come tonight Luke,” Brand says, eating steamed vegetables from a plate balanced on his stomach. The night before, Brand performed a ‘secret’ show in the East End of London to just 300 people, and he is doing a second and final show tonight to test out new material, and no journalists are allowed. “I was formulating opinions there and then and making them funny and having to take risks with the audience,” he says of last night’s performance. “And I love that, because I feel like I’m at capacity. And I think that for any creative or artistic person, that becomes the aim. I must remember that on the precipice, as I am, of a different kind of career with films: What is the end point? For me, the end point is to communicate authentically the experience of being from my own perspective: To be in contact with beauty and truth and God and love to descontruct those ideas and the impact of those things upon me. If you lose touch with that, then you’re not going to be happy. At least you know something that’s valid to you, if no one else.”

The afternoon is getting on and Brand has to attend a Narcotics Anonymous meeting just down the street. He sits up and rests his head in his hands for the briefest of moments. I ask him what he hopes to be remembered for. “I want to transcend entertainment and do something valuable,” he says, looking directly at me now. “I want to get past the ludicrous confines of my own egotism and its demands, and even my own artistic and creative demands, and do something that truly generates love. Do something beautiful and incredible and nourish people. The opposite of when you watch television or read something in the newspaper that makes you feel, ‘I’m not good enough.’ ‘I wish I looked different.’ ‘I wish I could change that about me.’ I want to have the opposite impact of that on people’s lives. So people go, ‘Yeah, I’m beautiful, everything’s wonderful.’ And I want to convey that in a direct way so I imagine I’ll be onstage, talking.”

LUKE CRISELL