Russell Brand’s handsome assistant, Tom, is there to meet me in the lobby of a
fancy hotel in Paris, telling me Brand will be about 20 minutes late. I
don’t want to wait as I could be shopping, and anyway I hate waiting.
So to disperse any potential mood I shop — demonically. In 20 minutes I buy
very expensive black shoes — platform, peep-toe — and a moss-green top from
Vanessa Bruno.
I feel better. I think not about Brand’s lateness but how my life will be
transformed by shoes that are both incredibly high and incredibly
comfortable. Now Brand is there waiting. A polite kiss on the cheek hello.
Perched by him is a plate of mixed berries and an espresso. He orders some
for me. Neither of us speaks French and both of us are scowled at.
He notices the purchases — it takes an addict to spot an addict. “The object
of addiction is almost irrelevant. It’s just the condition itself. Drugs and
alcohol might be the easiest way. As I’ve written in my book, I think heroin
is a fantastic drug; all of us have this sense of yearning and longing. I
need this woman, this car, or those shoes. If I have them it’s all going to
be okay.”
Brand asks to see the shoes. He has looked at his own addictions with such
scrutiny he’s now able to look at other people; he looks at me and the shoes
as if he’s seeing a brain scan with all the neural pathways flashing. He
started off in his early teens with bulimia, then alcohol, then drugs, then
sex; for a while each worked as a salvation that eventually turned on itself
and destroyed a piece of him.
From his book My Booky Wook you get the impression that his overriding
addiction was getting famous and that he could channel all the other
addictions away if only he could get worldwide fame — being loved by many
obviously being so much easier than being loved by one.
The film Forgetting Sarah Marshall won him fame in America, so much so that
his character in it, the rock star Aldous Snow, has had his own film written
for him. It is called Get Him to the Greek, the Greek being a famous venue
in LA. He’s also filmed a documentary about happiness with Oliver Stone, and
is soon to begin filming Arthur, reprising the Dudley Moore role.
Now — today anyway — he is not too bothered about being famous. As it happens,
fame was not his salvation: it made a lot of people not like him and others
chase him obsessively. Fame made him a tabloid entity and he hated that.
He’s questioning all his old obsessions. He hasn’t eaten chocolate for ages. I
tell him I love the comfort of chocolate. “Yes, but there’s a regret
afterwards. I always think of that Damien Hirst title, The Physical
Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living. The impossibility of
post-chocolate in the mind of the pre-chocolate. I am not going to run then
eat a Twix — all that stupid running just for one Twix. As I am with
chocolate, I am with everything. It’s better to not do it at all, because if
I begin I’ll go as far as I can.”
Brand believes he is putting distance between himself and addiction. “I’m
living in a disciplined way, do lots of yoga, exercise and transcendental
meditation. It’s not half good. They give you a mantra… You feel attuned to
a consciousness that is beyond your identity and beyond life.”
So now that fame is no longer his salvation, is he less driven? “I’m less
neurotic and I’m easier to work with. When one is addicted one becomes
accustomed to a certain amount of undulation in life. In the past I courted
chaos; not a deliberate courtship, just inadvertently. I feel happier, and I
don’t feel I need that same kind of attention.”
He offers to share his berries as mine haven’t arrived. “I’m becoming
spiritually idealistic. We are physical beings while we have access to the
divine and,” he says, not missing a beat, “I still love these boots.” He is
wearing pale blue-grey Chelsea boots in suede. “They are comfortable in
spite of being stylish. If I lost them I’d be really pissed off. I’m not
ready to let them go.” Slightly bewildered, I say he doesn’t have to. “But
at some point, Chrissy, and this is my concern. I don’t want to be chained
to these ideas. I don’t want to be chained to wanting fame.”
The previous night Brand went to the Galliano show with his new girlfriend,
the quirky pop star Katy Perry, who he met at this year’s Video Music Awards
(VMA), and whose most famous hit is the attention-grabbingly-titled I Kissed
a Girl. The Galliano show seems to have symbolised aesthetic beauty and
excessive theatricality, just the kind of stuff you would have thought Brand
loved. “Glorious on one level. An incredible spectacle. But on another level
I thought the fact that this fashion show exists on our planet during the
current ecological and economical troubles, it’s like visiting someone with
cancer and finding them having a facelift. Stop the madness.”
Brand himself doesn’t seem mad. He seems vulnerable but accepting of his
vulnerability. Therein lies his strength. He is tall, toned and seems happy
in his yoga body. His hair is so clean and shiny it could be in a L’Oréal
ad. His face has stubble, but not the full beard of a few months ago. He is
very handsome, in a young-George-Best-performing-in-a-goth-rock-band kind of
way. I wonder if the chubby teenager still lurks inside. He is polite and
attentive. In his book he describes himself as “feminised yet hysterically
heterosexual”. That makes him a winner with women. He likes women. They too
have played a part in his salvation, but it seems he’s had enough. For now
he’d like to try monogamy. Everything is “one day at a time”. That’s a
mantra he repeats. Maybe he just knows himself or just knows life, that
nobody can really make promises.
Brand grew up in Grays, Essex, never feeling he fitted in. He was an only
child. “My personality was defined by solitude. A lot less now, but
especially when I was a drug addict. I was always on my own, sat right up to
the telly. I’m only now making friends with people. I’m only really happy
when I’m performing. I’m like Judy Garland.” A performance as Fat Sam in
Bugsy Malone when he was at school seems to have been an epiphany. “When I
performed I thought, ‘Where’s the furthest that this can go?’ ”
His father left when he was a baby and they have had a hot-and-cold
relationship ever since. His mother, who he adores, has survived cancer
three times: uterine, breast and lymph. The last bout was when he was 17. He
is now 34. “A lifetime away.” Brand is childlike and wise; people always
come to him with their relationship problems — and he turns to Noel
Gallagher with his. Gallagher, Oscar Wilde and Morrissey are the unlikely
triumvirate of heroes he says saved him. He called his cat Morrissey.
He is sad about the cat just now. He came back to London after filming in the
US and has so far been unable to reconcile their relationship. “He just uses
the house as a place to get food. He comes in the middle of the night like a
truculent teen. In an attempt to win him back, I put a trail of Madagascan
prawns, starting with one by the cat flap, on espresso saucers leading up to
my bedroom, like some ghastly Grimm fairy-tale hell for felines. The next
day they were still there, tragic reminders of a broken-down relationship.
It might as well have been an affidavit on the stairs. I feel sad about it
because it was my most successful relationship with an animal… It was
straightforward: I love that cat and he loves me. But there must have been a
moment where he thought, ‘He’s not coming back, f*** it then.’ ”
My berries still haven’t arrived. Both Brand and I are completely ineffectual
in making the waitress do what we want. He is extremely polite, and that
doesn’t seem to work. Apart from in hotel lobbies, in most of the rest of
his life he is confrontational.
The night before we met I watched his new DVD, Scandalous, which confronts the
Sachsgate scandal (he calls if Manuelgate). The DVD starts with news footage
describing Jonathan Ross’s and Brand’s behaviour as offensive. Sachsgate’s
reverberations mean that the BBC is scared of its own shadow. Programming
post-Sachsgate is entirely different from pre-Sachsgate. In all this
enormity it is easy to lose sight of what actually happened. Andrew Sachs,
then 78, who played Manuel in Fawlty Towers, had been booked to do a
telephone interview on Brand’s Radio 2 show. When he failed to answer, Brand
left a string of messages on his home voicemail. The BBC Trust later called
this “a deplorable intrusion”. In the background is Jonathan Ross calling
out, “He f***ed your granddaughter” (23-year-old Georgina Baillie, a dancer
with a burlesque outfit called Satanic Sluts). This was in October 2008, and
people still talk about it.
Brand and Ross say they didn’t know it hadn’t been edited out. The Radio 2
controller, Lesley Douglas, was forced to resign. Brand resigned, and Ross
was suspended for 12 weeks without pay. Brand says: “I felt I didn’t have
any choice but to resign. I thought, ‘I don’t have to do that radio show,
I’m only doing it for a laugh and it’s become not a laugh.’ And then it was
a relief.”
In his stand-up show Brand says it wasn’t as if he were Harold Shipman or Fred
West. “There was no menace. Even a prank implies some kind of menace. I just
did it and it escalated. ‘Let’s leave a message. Oh, let’s leave another
message apologising for the message.’ It was just daftness. I read about the
anger and vitriol, and it felt alien to me. I thought, ‘What are they
talking about?’”
He has a history of intemperate behaviour. As a “befuddled lad”, Brand made a
film with the BNP protégé Mark Collett. But of the BNP leader Nick Griffin’s
recent appearance on Question Time, he said: “The more people who witness
him equivocate on myopic loathing, the better.”
Around the time of Sachsgate, Brand was hosting an MTV awards show in America
where he called George W Bush “a retarded cowboy fella” and discussed the
Jonas Brothers wearing promise rings to symbolise their virginity as being
like Superman taking the bus. He was more upset about America’s reaction to
that because he thought his film-star dreams were over. But it turned out to
be the most successful Video Music Awards for a decade and did nothing to
impede his film career. It may even have helped.
Googling himself was another addiction that became satiated because everything
he read was horrible. “It’s the most unrewarding, pointless activity,
googling yourself. I’m doing a lot better. It’s like picking a scab. I have
gone a few weeks without looking at it and it divorces you from the slurry
of casual vindictiveness.”
He survived it because worse things have happened to him. Like his mum having
cancer. How did he confront that? “I don’t know that I did the first two
times. I confronted it the third time by leaving home. I thought, ‘She’s
going to die, so I’m going.’ It’s very strange to have the closeness with my
mum and confront the idea, the heartbreak, of losing her.”
How has your relationship with your mother affected your relationships with
women?
“I’m an only child of a single mother — it probably meant that I’m demanding
and have high expectations of women. I look for salvation and redemption, to
be utterly embraced.”
Did you get that from your mother?
“Probably. Yes.” So, looking for redemption again, you had to look for lots of
different women? “I don’t think you can find it in another human being. It’s
a ridiculous, romantic and tragic idea that there’s someone who’s going to
save you, that we need our own personal Jesus. Salvation comes from within.”
Do you think you were looking for salvation through sex? He smiles, a
nostalgic smile.
“On the one hand, it’s bloody good fun. On the other I have addictive
tendencies. And on another it’s a biological imperative. One of the keys to
understanding life is the ability to hold opposing thoughts simultaneously,
to never have one ideology that answers your questions.”
Are you saying that if sex saves you it also destroys you? “Well, there you
go. I’ve stopped all that. One day at a time. I’m feeling a lot better. It’s
nice not to be chained to something.”
Is that how it felt, being chained? “Sort of. If you are born in a tin helmet
you barely notice the parameter, but once it’s been removed and you relax…
Also, once somebody is in the sphere of your domination they can no longer
be a channel of salvation. If a woman is under your spell, how is she going
to be the one who saves you?
“When Britney Spears was on the VMAs, between takes, hair and make-up people
would come over. We didn’t need hair or make-up, it was just like monkeys
comforting us, grooming us in a primal way, and I think a lot of my liaisons
were just like that, grooming… I am trying not to be glib about it. It’s not
like there’s been an endless carousel of strippers and lap dancers, but
there have been times when I have been in the company of prostitutes and
they were the most wonderful women in the world.”
Do you think monogamy is possible?
“It is if you want it, and value something.”
You have said you were very good at sex, is that why you wanted to have it a
lot, to be validated?
“Especially because I’m not good at any sport. It’s a pity there’s not some
forum where you can do it publicly.”
How do you test being good at it?
“A requiem of screams.”
How do you know it’s real?
“There’s eye-rolling ecstasy, the bacchanalian loss of self where they’re
ready to tear up the trees, the grapes are being ripped from the vines,
animals are being strewn across the forest. I think the roots of misogyny
are in the unity women have with universal forces when they come. Men go,
‘What are they doing?’ They become goddesses with oceanic pleasure that
looks like it may never end and could devour us.”
Are you scared of the orgasm? “I was a bit scared of them, when I was younger.
It’s a bit frightening, this transformative quality, an orgasm in women. I
imagine that it looks better than the miserable squirt men issue. It seems
different, though, when there’s an emotional element — transcendent.”
I’m wondering if this transcendence has been recently observed in his shiny
new relationship with Katy Perry. Happy to rip layers off himself and talk
about anything, Brand suddenly doesn’t want to say much. “She’s lovely and I
don’t want her to read anything about herself. The other day a journalist
from a tabloid in a ludicrous fedora said to me, ‘Russell, are you in love
with Katy?’ And I said, ‘You look like a character from a Graham Greene
novel. I think I’m in love with you.’ I said that to defuse the situation.
But what do they print? They print, ‘I think I am in love.’ ”
Of course since they met, a few weeks before my meeting with Brand, lots has
been written about them. It’s hard to guess who is more smitten, who is the
chaser and who is the chased. Her parents are churchy, both ministers. Perry
is cattish in interviews, arch, motor-mouthed, conflicted, given to
hyperbole. If they had met earlier, things might have been different. He
concurs: “I am living in a different way at the moment. Regardless of what
happens in my current situation, I am unlikely to be satisfied with the
calamitous promiscuity of the preceding five or six years.” It’s as if he’s
afraid to think long-term. It’s the teachings of all the recovery programmes
not to. “I still dream about drugs but I’m never allowed drugs in the dream.
I dream of smoking, drinking, former decadence, but I always wake before I
get what I want.”
I wonder if he dreams the drug dream about women. He doesn’t want to answer,
but later on we talk about him being in The Tempest with Helen Mirren. He
has talked before about her overripe sexuality and how he fancies her. She
gave him a book.
“She wrote in it, ‘Russell, to a genius from a mere mortal, love Helen.’ So I
look at it sometimes when I’m wracked with doubt.” About your genius? “No, I
just w**k over it. Already the genius page is stuck together. I squandered
it on day one as soon as I saw it.”
It strikes me that he made a documentary with Oliver Stone about happiness
because it is still what he is looking for. They filmed it at Louisiana
State Penitentiary.
“It’s this beautiful Louisiana countryside — somehow bleak when you can feel
the vibrating souls of the 5,200 inmates, 92% of whom will die in there. The
governor is a Southern Baptist and if you’re in Louisiana State
Penitentiary, you’d better bring a Bible. The prisoners I was exposed to had
accepted Christianity and found happiness through that.”
I wonder if Brand’s stand-up self is an exaggerated version of himself or a
different persona. “I wouldn’t behave the same with my mother as with a
woman I wanted to seduce. I think one modulates one’s behaviour according to
circumstance.” Despite Brand the soon-to-be-movie-star persona, Brand the
stand-up is a hard act to follow because it is the place where he is most
himself. “There isn’t a filter, and it’s easier to achieve success than it
is through acting.” By this he means nobody else is making the decisions, he
is not waiting for the call back. He is just being himself and unstoppable.
In real life though?
“I protect myself emotionally where possible. Last year at the VMAs there were
death threats, so obviously this year when I did the VMAs it was
deliberately designed to not cause anyone any bother, but be funny and
confident. There was a very deliberate removal of self-destruction. I didn’t
take the risks I’d have taken in the past.”
His hair isn’t backcombed, he is wearing no dangly jewellery. It’s a metaphor.
There is less clutter, more purity, more control, lots of yoga. In fact,
yoga is about to happen. We take a break while he goes to exercise. When he
returns he’s still worrying about the fashion show last night.
“Girls might be subjected to more pressure on how they look. The fashion
industry makes an elite few feel better about themselves and most people
feel worse about themselves. It makes them bulimic and anorexic. It’s
stimulating a desire that could never be fulfilled. It’s decoration on a
dreadful wedding cake at a marriage between us and the demise of the planet.
The doubts I’m currently confronting is that I’m part of this as long as I’m
attending one of those events. I’m endorsing those ideas.”
Perhaps this rankles particularly because he himself was aspiring towards a
role model that didn’t exist when he was a bulimic. “I wanted to feel thin
and gorgeous. My dad was a good footballer, my stepdad was a good
footballer. The culture was defined at my school by being good at football
or fighting, and if you were chubby and feminine doing daft voices, you
don’t realise until you encounter the Smiths or Oscar Wilde that it is cool
to be different and not to fit in.”
Yesterday he went to Père Lachaise, to Oscar Wilde’s tomb. “Littered with
kisses, it is — the pilgrimage of the dispossessed that he has inspired to
go to that place. I was strange, awkward and peculiar and I would listen to
the Smiths for the first time and think it’s the best thing in the world.
Oscar begat Morrissey.”
The bulimia, though, was about wanting to fit in. “I was eating all those
Penguins. I couldn’t leave them. Blue followed yellow followed green. An
army of Penguins, marching into my mouth and out again. They didn’t stay
long. Terrible state they were in. They went in all proud and came out
bewildered, like Vietnam vets.”
When did you get confident? “It’s an ongoing process. I fluctuate in
confidence and doubt, but probably as soon as I got out of my podgy teens
and into drama school in my early twenties I did feel there were things that
I was good at.”
I leave Paris on Eurostar and Brand is doing his yoga. Tabloids report more on
the Brand/Perry love nest in the fancy hotel. We meet again the next day at
the Sunday Times Magazine photoshoot in north London. He is in skinny jeans
and a loose-knit mohair jumper. He tells me his nipples are pointing out. He
looks groomed and handsome and quiet.
After our meeting he must talk with LA about Arthur. He says it’s a beautiful
script. Some bits are from the original. “Arthur is still an alcoholic
billionaire playboy and I’ll be getting a bit of a haircut for that.” Are
you worried about that? “You have to move on. I have dreams of my hair being
short and I wake up in a Samson-like panic, but I think I’m ready for
transformation.”
The Liza Minnelli role has yet to be cast. “I figure Minnelli was a kind of
kookie pop star then, so we’d have to look at the kookie female pop stars of
the current age.” He’s laughing a little bashfully. You mean you want Katy
Perry to play it? He doesn’t answer, but he blushes. “Am I blushing?” His
silky, olivy skin looks a little burnt around the cheeks, and we move on to
talking about prospective directors for Arthur and how he met Baz Luhrmann
in a lift and talked to David Lynch about transcendental meditation.
Which one of his parents is he more like?
“Good combination of both. My mum is sensitive and tender, and my dad is very
funny.”
How is your relationship with your dad?
“It hasn’t always been an easy relationship, but I want to be loving and
generous. I know he is very proud of me, but we’re sort of in different
places. It might take a while.”
When Brand was growing up his father was a fluctuating presence. They bonded
when he was 16 and his father took him on a holiday to the Far East and they
ended up picking prostitutes in Thailand. It seems an extreme way to bond.
When you saw him last were you on good terms? “No, it was a difficult, but
it’s something I could mend. I’d like to mend it.” He talks about his father
with love but I’m not sure he really knows him.
His phone rings and he’s asking after a little boy. “I love that little boy.
He’s one of the loves of my life, a gorgeous child.
I knew his parents before he was born and now he’s six. Brilliant,
challenging, obnoxious. The last time I saw him I was at his house at
bedtime. I was talking to him and he was absent-mindedly playing with my
hair. It was precious.”
So you’re feeling broody? “I am, actually. It’s seven years since I took
drugs. I’ve made a film. I don’t think I have to fight so much. I’ve
grown weary of the carousel.” He’s also stopped working so compulsively. “I
am more into having jaunts. It’s been a while since I’ve done terrible
things like shoplifted or threw a phone…” He’s almost doing okay. Only the
fact that the cat won’t talk to him is a source of unresolved pain. He is
really upset about it and hopes he might have returned when he gets home.
The next day I get a message: Morrissey was lured back with some Greek
yoghurt. Brand’s life is replete, at least for today.
The Russell Brand DVD Scandalous — Live at the O2 is out on November 9
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