Watch a
near-naked Russell Brand discuss philandering (while straddling a surfboard)
The ranch-style house just above Sunset Boulevard, with a pool and views to
the Pacific Ocean, seems much like any other Hollywood Hills home. Just a
couple of paces through the open front door, though, and the distinctive
estuary cries within tell me that this corner of a foreign field is, for
now, Essex. Here, Russell Brand, celebrated son of Grays, has established
his American bridgehead. As relentlessly as he has brought Britain to its
quivering knees, our most ebullient and unashamedly fame-seeking comedian
plans to overwhelm the people here, from sea to shining sea.
Will his attempt to seduce America be his greatest triumph? Or will his very
British humour and determinedly idiosyncratic demeanour leave Americans,
perhaps, a little shaken but not very stirred?
Come to think of it, how did they ever let him in? Isn’t this the man who was
notoriously fired by MTV for dressing up as Osama Bin Laden on September 12,
2001? Who delineated his ferocious appetite for all kinds of illegal drugs
and illicit women in My Booky Wook, his hilarious, sometimes brilliant and
always indulgent autobiography, which was a huge bestseller in Britain last
year.
For now, though, as befits him, Brand is engaged in a more intimate American
conquest. As I follow the crazed whoops and screams up the stairs and into a
bedroom, there’s our Russell, all big, tousled hair, stubbly beard and
smeared make-up, naked, in bed with two women, at 11am. Bless him.
“We’re just ’aving a business meeting!” he squeals. More gales of laughter.
“Are you an Eng-lish-man?” he asks jauntily, as if it’s not obvious. I am
perched at the very end of the bed, trying to pretend, as any Englishman
would, that I’m really quite used to conducting interviews in such
circumstances. Brand, 32, despite appearances a polite and well brought up
young man, facilitates the introductions.
“This lady’s Jennifer,” he says, gesturing to the beautiful, statuesque blonde
American naked under the covers on his right. “She’s an enigma,” he adds. An
enigma, I suspect, because it seems that she and Brand only got to know each
other the previous night.
“And this is Sharon, my assistant,” he says, glancing to his left. Sharon, I
now see, is the only one of the three who is clothed.
We engage in a bit of idle chitchat, about yoga, among other things, which
Brand practises every day, and about a yoga teacher Jennifer and I both
know, who – I tell Brand for no good reason – “seems completely straight but
is gay. Unlike you,” I add, “who seems gay but is completely straight”.
“Yes, I do seem incredibly gay, but look how straight I am,” he says,
motioning to the two women he’s in bed with. “How straight do you want? And
there’s another couple of people under the sheets. And a Mexican boy down
here. Ramos! Ramos!”
Sharon climbs out of bed. “Russell, if you don’t get up and do this interview,
your day’s going to be completely messed up,” she tells him.
“Oh, no!” he shrieks. “What will happen? Will I be attacked by crows?”
Brand is not one of those Tony Hancock-style comedians who is funny when
performing but glum and depressive in private. With Brand, though, it’s hard
to know whether the manic private life begat the hysterical public persona
or vice versa. As he says in My Booky Wook: “My life is just a series of
embarrassing incidents strung together by telling people about those
embarrassing incidents.”
What Brand has been able to do, more successfully than any modern comedian, on
either side of the Atlantic, is to strip away all boundaries between his
private and public personas. He is his act. At the same time, though, his
act is not an act, it is Russell Brand, in all his crazed glory, all his
unhinged desires and neuroses, unfiltered, rampant, hyper-sexual, but
mediated by a strangely knowing, postmodern, almost Buddhist awareness that
everything he desires and seeks and feels and needs is, in the great
metaphysical scheme of things, meaningless. That’s what he says, at least.
The big question now, though, is whether Americans will succumb to the
enticements of Russell Brand, as they have to Sacha Baron Cohen and Ricky
Gervais. The important difference being that Baron Cohen became famous in
America through his Borat character, and Gervais by playing Andy Millman in
Extras, whereas Russell Brand’s only real character is Russell Brand.
I ask him whether he thinks America will take to a deliriously foppish,
self-obsessed, camp, raving hetero-sexual, with hair like a bird’s nest.
“I read recently that George Bernard Shaw said, ‘The world is formed by
unreasonable men,’” he says, in the quieter pedantic voice he sometimes
uses. “‘A reasonable man looks at the world and sees how he can fit in with
it. An unreasonable man looks at the world and sees how he can change it to
fit in with him.’ I like this quote of George Bernard Shaw’s. I’ll not be
changing, but America will be.”
That doesn’t mean that even Brand is expecting to change America overnight. He
has a master plan. His initial, exploratory charge over the parapet comes
this weekend with the US release of his first big American movie, the
romantic comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall.
Well, it’s not really Brand’s movie. As yet completely unknown in the States,
he gets a measly fourth billing, beneath even the Band Clist American cast.
He’s not even mentioned in articles about the film over here.
“I prefer doing things that are solely focused on me, if I’m honest,” he says.
Who knew? Still, Forgetting Sarah Marshall should be a hit, and that will
introduce Brand to America. It’s the latest film from the production factory
of Judd Apatow, America’s reigning king of movie comedy. He brought you The
40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Superbad. Although the plot is risible,
the film’s pretty funny. Unsurprisingly, Brand steals every scene he’s in.
He plays Aldous Snow, a rock star who takes up with the girlfriend of the
main character. The reviews have been good, as he is keen to tell me.
“I got particularly singled out,” he says with characteristic lack of modesty.
“Variety said it was ‘a marvellously droll and controlled performance from
Russell Brand’.” (Variety did say that: I checked.)
Described by Variety as “a slinky, self-absorbed Brit rocker”, Snow dresses in
what appear to be Brand’s own tight, black, Lizard King leather trousers.
The character acts like an exaggerated parody of the least appealing parts
of Brand’s personality. He is, therefore, preening, hideously self-obsessed,
sexually rampant and aggravatingly petulant. But also, of course, extremely
funny.
Apparently, before Brand was cast, the character was meant to be “a bookish
sort of author”, he tells me, “but they rewrote the part for me and they
gave me loads of room to improvise”. Before they started shooting the film
last summer, in Hawaii, they rehearsed for two weeks, “so there was time to
develop the character – or, in my case, to undevelop the character... until
it’s exactly like me”.
I should probably mention that Brand and I are now in the living room
downstairs. He has arranged himself crosslegged on a big chair. He’s wearing
a black leather jacket, a West Ham shirt, a pearl necklace, long woolly
Afghan socks and purple knickers. Perhaps it’s too early in the day for
trousers. Perhaps he just forgot. A swelling sea of people laps around us,
including his manager and the producer of his weekly Radio 2 show, which
Brand has been doing the past couple of weeks from the house. He’s also kept
writing his weekly football column, in which he regularly mentions his
genuine allegiance to West Ham, for The Guardian newspaper.
As we chat, Brand tries to concentrate, but he’s easily distracted and is now
waving at someone behind me. Jennifer, in an extremely short blue dress, is
on the stairs, about to do a twirl. “She was going to show me her bum then,”
Brand tells me, sounding very Frankie Howerd. “Hey, you’re gorgeous!” he
shouts to her. “Ain’t she gorgeous? I’m lucky.”
He has been in LA for the past couple of months because he is now starring as
Adam Sandler’s sidekick in a movie called Bedtime Stories. In fact, he has
Sandler, who appeared on The Russell Brand Show – his 2006 chat show – to
thank for his LA sojourn. “He recommended me to his agent,” he recalls. “His
agent said, ‘Do you want to come to LA and make films?’ I said, ‘How odd
that you would say that. That’s exactly what I want to do.’ ” He also shares
his agent with Sacha Baron Cohen and Chris Rock.
After that, Brand will star in another Judd Apatow comedy, but he will be
commuting to and from the UK a lot over the next 18 months. He’s doing
another series of Ponderland for Channel 4, some stand-up and another book.
He’s also going to South America to make a documentary about “revolution”
and meet people like the Venezue-lan president Hugo Chavez, if there are any
other people like Hugo Chavez. And he and the film director Michael
Winterbottom have finished the first draft of a script adapted from My Booky
Wook.
When he first approached Brand, Winterbottom asked if he would like to play
himself in the film. “ Yes!” he replied. “I’m not going
to have lived that life so that when it gets turned into a film, some other
f***er turns up and does it. That’s the payoff. It makes living that life
worthwhile.”
Sharon appears with a cup of coffee for me. “Got any cat’s milk?” Brand asks
her. “Give him cat’s milk, Shaz. It’s the only way he’ll learn.”
Brand admits he has an uneasy relationship with fame and success. On the one
hand, he has always craved it, and it has been the engine of his life and
career. He went to drama school as a teenager because he realised,
“Performing was my way out of Grays, conformity and myself,” he says in My
Booky Wook. But later, he notes, “Once I finally got a bit of success, it
became clear that my internal deficit of sadness and longing would not
really be sated by the things I always thought would save me. The
realisation made me turn to hard drugs – specifically her-oin – in an even
more concerted way than I ever had before.”
I wonder if he finally eased up when he became really successful in the UK,
two or three years ago?
“No. Within about 15 minutes I thought, let’s go to America,” he says. “I’m
aware that it’s vacuous, that it’s temporary, that it’s transient and
meaningless, but I have enough love and regard for my art to feel validated
in the pursuit of fame. If I was to spend the rest of my life performing
stand-up in front of 30 people above a pub, I would carry on doing it. I
would do it while under the spell of her-oin, but I would carry on doing it.
“May I say, explicitly and without any duplicity: I like being famous. I like
it. I did it on purpose. I did it quite, quite deliberately. I went into it
with my eyes open, and I won’t rest until there is not a single territory on
this planet where I can’t go to a supermarket. Obscurity does not suit me.
You can’t have this haircut and not be famous. It’s unbecoming.”
I tell him that I had seen him in a restaurant in LA a couple of weeks before.
I thought he looked adrift in a place where nobody recognised him, apart
from me. “And I tried not to stare,” I say.
“I wish you had,” he says. “It would have been welcome. Out here, I’m just a
man with strange clothing and odd hair.”
Brand says the worst thing about not being famous is that it’s harder for him
to pick up women. “Everyone tells me it’s good for me,” he says. “It doesn’t
feel good. What felt good was being able to just walk up to people, tug a
forelock and know that an orgasm was only moments away. This new world, of
endless protocol, is like f***ing living in a Jane Austen novel.” Although
My Booky Wook begins and ends with his April 2005 incarceration in a
sex-addiction clinic in Philadelphia, he seems to be unapologetically off
the sex-wagon these days. He’s still clean and sober, though.
A couple of weeks after interviewing Brand, I catch a stand-up show he does in
a small, 100-seat club on Hollywood Boulevard. He’s doing gigs every few
weeks, trying out his persona and material on American audiences, although a
good percentage of the house that night is British. The show is brilliant, a
riot, running the uniquely Brand gamut from high-flown references (the
poststructuralist philosophers Derrida and Lacan, the Method theorist
Stanislavsky) to his love of “bumming” and the unrepeatable things he might
do to the Queen if he was ever to be knighted and on his knees in front of
her. When he describes meeting Macaulay Culkin in Hawaii and feeling he
can’t ask him about Michael Jackson, he brings the house down. “Come on,
mate, be honest. Michael Jackson. What happened? Neverland? Some-timesland.”
Brand knows that getting attuned to what works with live audiences is critical
to his success or failure in America. “Stand-up is the spine of everything I
do, me in relationship with an audience, because that’s what I like best,
where there’s no filter,” he says. “My intention is to do films in tandem
with stand-up comedy. The role models are Rich-ard Pryor, Woody Allen, Steve
Martin. There exists a clear template in American entertainment that doesn’t
exist in the UK. Pryor, really, he’s my hero in all of that.”
But as Brand faces the prospect of spending a lot more time in LA in the next
few years, I wonder how comfortable he really feels about it. “I miss my
cat, Morrissey, a lot,” he says. “And I miss my mum, I miss her loads.”
I get the sense, though, as he looks out from the patio of his house, across
Hollywood, that he also feels a certain anxiety as he realises that his
ultimate goal – to be world famous – may now be within his grasp. “At the
moment, it is very exciting, all of this, coming over here, but I’m aware of
how fragile it is, so I’m just trying to enjoy it,” he says. “And trying to
live in the moment and remembering that the things that are ultimately
important are not material or related to fame or orgasms.
“I met this swami, and I said, ‘I’m a bit ridden with egotism and ambition,
I’m riddled with it, I’m alive with it, I’m crawling with the stuff.’ He
said, ‘Don’t worry. It’s a gift from God. Use it in the service of God.’
Except he said Krishna, but I’m anglicising it to make it sound less
oooooeeee. . .”
You have got to love a man who is so openly self-deprecating about his
greatest desire. As Brand well knows. “Thanks for coming,” he says as I
leave. “What a lovely journey we’ve had. Make me look beautiful.”
Forgetting Sarah Marshall opens on April 25
