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So, how to top a life of hedonistic excess, followed by superstardom, a couple of best-selling books, and marriage to a superhot pop star? How about a trip into outer space? It's a region with which British actor and comedian Russell Brand is intimately familiar, having been a heroin and crack and sex addict. But now he's slated to go there for real on his wife's dime. Katy Perry, whom he wed in October 2010, bought him a $200,000 ticket last year for his 35th birthday, before they were married, to blast off from New Mexico's Spaceport America aboard a Virgin Galactic spaceship.
The future space tourist has pretty much covered all the bases of celebrity excess. The highlights reel from the life of the planet's luckiest former junkie is not short on thrills or spills. His childhood bouts with bulimia and self-cutting. Losing his virginity at 16 to a Philippine hooker hired by his father. A dozen arrests for a variety of charges. Getting thrown out of the acting academy for batshit-crazy ("artistic") behavior and drug use. Getting canned by MTV U.K. for showing up for work at its London studio dressed like Osama bin Laden on September 12, 2001. Arrested in London after stripping down to his Che Guevara underwear during an anti-globalization demonstration he was covering for MTV. Describing President George W. Bush as a "retarded cowboy" during the MTV Video Music Awards. The Kate Moss sex scandal. Getting fired from London radio station XFM for reading pornographic material over the airwaves and inviting homeless people into the studio.
The Bush remark didn't earn him any fans on the right. "The VMAs were a lot of fun," Brand has said of the fallout. "Especially the death threats. If you are going to kill someone, don't give them advance notice, which gives you a chance to prepare. These Christian Republicans were watching me and thought, 'Well, this is no good, I shall do a death threat.' "
Brand has said that he was deeply into drugs during the bin Laden episode, during which he reportedly had his drug dealer and the dealer's son in tow.
"As my sexual appetite grew, I found myself engaged in an increasingly desperate quest to satisfy it."
"Back then I was very anarchic in a very uneducated way," he's been quoted. "I thought, good, I'm glad society is crumbling, I'm glad everyone is afraid. When a catastrophe happens, it's like, I feel that way all the time, everything's always a catastrophe. So stuff like that levels the playing field, I think."
He has defended his self-destructive brand of comedy: "Humor is unnecessarily destructive and sacrilegious in some instances. And you can use that to very good effect sometimes. But occasionally you just get caught up and do daft things". When people go, 'Oh, don't make jokes about that' about certain topics... that's where you need jokes! This is horrible and depressing, so cheer it up with a little bit of glitter and magic."
Somehow, through all the insanity, Brand has managed to carve out a mainstream movie career in America, appearing as a version of his former drugged-out self in Get Him to the Greek. As the comeback rocker Aldous Snow, a character he first played in 2008's Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Brand got to wreak that old havoc on screen, relapsing into drugs and hilarity. Then there was his turn as the lovable drunk of Arthur in the unnecessary remake of the 1980s hit film. In 2012 he will play the narrator Lonny in the film version of the Broadway mascara-metal musical Rock of Ages.
"I've always had this impulse to be destructive. I'm more on my guard now."
The 36-year-old Brand was born in Essex, England, in 1975. His photographer dad Ronald Brand reportedly has been in and out of his son's life since he first left Russell and his mum when Russell was just six months old. Mother Barbara, who worked as a secretary, survived three bouts with cancer before Brand reached 17. That is one of the many things he has cited as contributing to his later proclivities and mental health issues.
Brand's 11-year affair with the drugs began during one such cancer scare when he was in his teens. "I started with loads of grass and hash, then took loads of amphetamines, then loads of acid, then loads of ecstasy and loads of coke, till in the end I took loads of crack and heroin," he has said. When he talks about smack, it's like he's talking about a long lost love: "Finding heroin, it's like God, home, a lover. Just this feeling of being engulfed by warmth, everything moving away, your life, everything, and withdrawing into this beautiful sanctuary." Terrifying words.
Somehow he was able to keep up his various habits while turning into a household British television personality.
He wasn't killing his career, he was killing himself," his dad, Ronald, has been quoted. "He has had the strength of character to come back from what he went through and to be clean. He is an ordinary kid who has worked hard on himself and is a great example for any young person who has the ambition to succeed, because he has been through a lot. Even though a lot was self-inflicted, he faced the challenges. Now he won't even drink coffee. He is exercising. He does yoga. He is into Buddhism. Every element of his life is clean and healthy. I think the energy you see on TV or stage is all adrenaline, because he is doing what he has wanted to do all his life."
"I'd spend my days interviewing pop stars and my evenings in crack houses," Brand has said of his time at MTV U.K. "It was my whole life for ages, and I loved it."
Brand maintains that he has been clean from drugs and alcohol since 2002. But after cleaning up, the impulse to overindulge took the form of a self-destructive sex life. His 2010 memoir My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-up starts off with his description of entering a sex-rehab clinic in Philadelphia. He did a 30-day stint there at the behest of his manager, John Noel. The way Brand tells it, his libido was off the charts.
"As my sexual appetite grew, I found myself engaged in an increasingly desperate quest to satisfy it," he wrote. "I became so open to suggestion that when someone asked me if I'd like to go to an orgy, I didn't think twice before accepting the invitation."
Brand's style and lifelong assault on what he has described as "the tyranny of the ordinary" doesn't always sit well with other stars. Actor Kevin Spacey said in 2008 that he had no interest in Brand performing in his productions at London's Old Vic theater. "I would never ask Russell Brand because he's just a f**king personality," sniffed the American Beauty star. "That's not acting. He's not an actor." Musician and philanthropist Bob Geldof called him a "c**t" while accepting an award at Britain's 2006 NME Awards. Brand earned that one, since he had introduced Geldof as "Sir Bobby Gandalf."
Brand doesn't seem to suffer at the hands of critics. He is unabashed about his past, working the nastier parts into stand-up comedy bits, exposing himself to anyone willing to listen. But he seems to be always walking a delicate line, knowingly winking at the precipice.
"I've always had this impulse to be destructive," he has said. "I'm more on my guard now. But I've always had this thing in me, a Bacchanalian impulse. The thing that says there's only this, there's only now, there's nothing else, so f**k everything. I still have little explosions of it, but I have to say to myself, remember, you've got all these things to do" don't ruin it just for the moment."
"I'd spend my days interviewing pop stars and my evenings in crack houses."
Many interviewers over the years have asked the obvious question: How did he manage to survive the self-destruction and wind up on the A list" "It's not a surprise to me that I'm becoming successful," he answered a few years back. "It's a surprise that, given the way I've carried on, it's still happened. But it was always my intention. It's not an accident."
Brand lives in Los Angeles with Perry and their three cats in a 1925 mansion that cost them $6.5 million. The two first met on the set of Get Him to the Greek in 2008, and were engaged during a trip to India the following year. They had a traditional Hindu wedding at the same spot where they got engaged, near a tiger sanctuary in northern India.
A movie based on his memoir has been in the works, but is reportedly stalled. Brand has said he will not portray himself if it is made. He has also mentioned a possible documentary collaboration with Gimme Shelter filmmaker Albert Maysles, and is slated to star in a remake of the 1991 comedy Drop Dead Fred.
The fever pace of Brand's career and his continued resistance to ordinariness seem to only be growing with his star power. His wild, antiauthoritarian shtick works, and he's sticking with it.
