total:spec - Russell Brand

When people look back on the summer of 2006, one name will be more prominent than any other - that of Russell Brand. Riding into the nation’s consciousness in the Trojan horse that is his E4 show Big Brother’s Big Mouth, the anarchic (both in hairstyle and lifestyle) TV presenter stroke comedian is now the most talked-about TV personality of the year and, against all odds, has become ridiculously famous.

It’s not just for his TV work, although BBBM and his MTV chat show 1 Leicester Square have both become cult viewing, creating yet another ‘love him or hate him’ TV personality that people adore and abhor in equal measure. Neither is it just for his comedy work, which made him one of the fastest-selling acts at the Edinburgh Festival this year. It’s also because of his seemingly eventful love life and drug problem past - two things that have made him both tabloid fodder and a bona fide gossip-generating celebrity.

Now, with the whole country talking about him for these various reasons, the 31-year-old has headed out around the UK on an epic stand-up tour called Shame. Filled with uncomfortably hilarious anecdotes about his troubled past, the gigs will be a triumphant end to an amazing year for the Essex-born star.

With so much success finally under his belt, you may expect the man who has been romantically linked to Kate Moss (amongst many other famous females), and who is known for his belligerent and surreal streams of consciousness, might be sporting a somewhat super-sized ego right now. Not so. Russell Brand in the flesh is a surprisingly humble character, one who has unequivocally gone through hell and back to get where he is and, as such, is hugely grateful for the second chance he’s getting.

“I burnt a lot of bridges before, with all my antics,” he says, sitting down to a green tea in a London hotel. “But I’m much better now and I’m just keeping my nose clean. Doing that Big Brother job I’ve not caused anyone any trouble. I actually have a special contract saying that if there’s any nonsense I can be fired at a moment’s notice.

“But I’ve gone in and done the job, had a laugh, kept me head down. I’ve been serving my time. Not that working on Big Brother’s Big Mouth is like being in Pentonville nick. It’s far more like Strangeways,” he quips. “No, actually I really enjoy it, I love doing that programme.”


Big Brother’s Big Mouth, the noisy Big Brother discussion show that Brand has presented on E4 since 2004, is the show that has brought him back from the edge after three years in a career wilderness, after Brand was fired in 2001 from his job at MTV. The presenter hosted a number of shows on the music channel, but one in particular, where he went around clubs in the UK talking nonsense to wasted clubbers, provided him with plenty of opportunity to cause trouble. At this time Brand was addicted to crack and heroin. He was at the peak of his drug-taking, and he seemed to have no sense of what was inappropriate behaviour. “I just thought nothing mattered, or nothing had any meaning or value,” he explains. “I just thought it was funny, really.”

Brand would clock up lots of extras on hotel bills that MTV had to pay for. He would leave bacon behind picture frames. He once left his two pet snails behind in a hotel room, where they were rescued by the RSPCA. He also once left an actual pig’s head in a hotel. “We were using it as a little puppet for the show,” he says, “and we just abandoned it.”

There was an incident where he jumped on his boss’s car, damaging it. Fellow drug addicts would be allowed into the MTV offices and just wander around. He even brought his drug dealer in to show him around. But it was on September 12, 2001 that MTV finally cracked and fired him. On the day after the terrorist attacks in America, Brand turned up at MTV for a scheduled interview with Kylie Minogue wearing an Osama Bin Laden outfit. “That was insensitive,” he reflects, deadpan.

Brand discovered just how addictive his personality was (he also admits to being a sex addict) when he was 16. Having left a troubled home life - an only child, his father left when he was a baby, he didn’t get with his stepfather - to attend the Italia Conti stage school. It was there he found drugs. He tried everything and admits that “drugs didn’t really agree with me”. But then he tried heroin. “When I took that I thought, ‘Oh my God, a drug that works at last.”

The reason behind his enthusiastic chemical ingestion was a need to fill a void he felt he had in his life. “I’ve got a lot of energy and a high capacity for consuming experience,” he explains. “I need stimulus and something happening or I get bored. I need things to happen so when stuff is not happening - and stuff can’t always be happening can it? - I get frustrated. Like even now I’m looking at that cuticle on my finger that’s been pushed down - some might say that examining that cuticle doesn’t give the thrill you need in life, like hang-gliding, or playing golf with lemmings. No, that’d be cruel.”

So what fills the void now? “Work,” replies Brand immediately. “I do a lot of stand-up comedy. I look at my cat. Do yoga. A bit of flirting.”

Brand got kicked out of Italia Conti for his drug-taking, and was then unable to pursue acting because of his reputation. “No agencies would try me out because they thought I was a drug addict madman, and they were right,” he says. “So I had to go and do stand-up comedy because you’ve got control of that yourself and you don’t need anyone to give you a job. You can just do it above a pub, or by a pub, or near a pub, or under a pub. As long as there is a pub somewhere in the proximity, stand-up comedy can work.

“I was good at it. It was easy to get a foothold. I’ve got an aptitude for talking to people and being funny when I’m trying to be really sexy and cool. That’s probably when I’m at my funniest, as I don’t seem to be able to master being sexy and cool at all. I’d get incredibly nervous before I performed, and when I was drinking and taking drugs, my nervousness manifested itself as arrogance and aggression. Now my nervousness comes out as humility. It’s a good transition.

“I’d have five or six good gigs and then about four awful, awful ones where there were fights on stage. I got arrested after gig at the Edinburgh Festival once. I got into a fight with security at the venue and got my leg gashed up. I had to go to hospital and have hundreds of stitches, and I was trying to buy heroin in casualty reception.”

Did you succeed? “No. Would you believe that when I gave a group of 12-year-old boys £40 to go and buy me some heroin they didn’t come back. I was disgusted. What does this say for Anglo-Scottish relations when you can’t trust some 12-year-old boys in casualty at midnight with blood spraying out of your leg to go and buy you some heroin? Not since Hadrian’s Wall came down has there been such a slight. I think we should put it back up on the strength of that alone.”

These days his stand-up routines are less dramatic and eventful, and instead of having good gigs and bad gigs he only seems to have good gigs. “I’m much better at it now I’m not on drugs,” says Brand. “I’m in much less trouble, I’m not so rude. I’m not a pain in the arse. I’m funnier and I’ve got more respect for myself. I just want to be funny. It’s not a big aggressive mental breakdown like it used to be.”


It was stand-up that got him his job at MTV first time round, and it would be stand-up that rescued him again. Once he was fired from MTV he managed to keep his presenting career going for a while, hosting the show Re:Brand on UK Play which saw him tackle social taboos. He had a boxing match with his father, tried to convert the leader of the young BNP to socialism, and tested his heterosexuality by having a sexual encounter with a man in a toilet.

But as his drug problem worsened, the TV work dried up, and Brand realised he needed to sort himself out. He went to a treatment centre run by a charity called Focus, of which he’s now a patron.

“It turns people who are drug addicts into slightly less unreliable members of society,” says Brand. “Marginally less dizzy and twittish contributors, like me.

“It was a really hard thing to do,” he adds. “You don’t half miss heroin after you’ve been taking it awhile. It’s like losing a family member, or losing access to an enthralling PlayStation game you were really enjoying - ever so difficult, painful, but ultimately really rewarding.”

Do you ever worry you might start again? “I think you can never be complacent about it. I’ll try not to. But all I can say, genuinely, is that I won’t take any drugs today. I follow what I learnt during treatment and it becomes much easier not to take drugs as you go on.”

Brand turned his tale into a hugely-successful stand-up routine, the critically-lauded Better Now, and in 2004 he landed the job on Big Brother’s Big Mouth, at the time called Efourum. He’d not watched Big Brother before.

“I just never got turned on to it,” he says. “I was aware it was going on because of the phenomenal impact that it had but, I don’t know, I was busy at nine o’clock. That’s when I like to look out the window.”

With or at your cat? “At the cat. Sometime he looks back. Sometimes we get a tin can each and we connect them with string. Then I’ll just cry tears and wait for the tears to be absorbed by the string. He’s at the other end and he drinks them. Some people have judged me for that. But there’s no more natural a thing.”

But now you watch Big Brother. “Yeah and he just sits out there on his own licking dry twine.”

Since Big Brother took Brand from his cat-related activities, he’s stayed out of enough trouble to be able to build on his success. He won Time Out Comedian Of The Year earlier this year, and he has a number of projects on the go, including a Radio 2 sitcom called Cloud Cuckoo Land, and a show for Channel 4 where he immerses himself in “unusual experiences”.

“It’s made my mum proud of me, which is nice,” says Brand. “She nearly cries when she speaks to me because she’s happy that I’m not all ill and that. There were times when it looked like I was going to die, or go to a mental hospital. And now I’ve got every chance of doing both, dying in a mental hospital,” he laughs. “And filming it. But, no, she’s really proud and that’s really important because I ain’t got no brothers or sisters or anything.”

Brand has also returned to acting, the career he first started to embark on before things went wrong. Bit parts in the drama White Teeth and the BBC sitcom Blessed have joined a small role in the forthcoming Christina Ricci and Reese Witherspoon-starring film Penelope on his CV.

“I sat next to Christina at the read-through,” says Brand. “She was not as extraordinary as I thought she’d be. I suppose everybody’s just normal people aren’t they? I expected a movie star to float in on a cloud or something. But obviously she didn’t because she is a human being, so those expectations were naïve.

“I didn’t meet Reese Witherspoon. She weren’t there so I can only assume she is a right bastard,” he laughs. “That’s gone into that little box,” he says, motioning to the tape recorder. “I mean it,” he laughs, turning into the Brand we know on screen. “She’s a right bastard. I’ll say it to my dying day. My epitaph will be: Russell Brand - above all else he believed Reese Witherspoon to be a right bastard.”

She’ll be a guest on 1 Leicester Square now. “Oh fuck, she will won’t she? She’ll hopefully realise that this was a joke, unless you craftily fashion it into a malicious outburst, you bastard. That would be very vindictive.”