From sordid to celebrity

British stand-up Russell Brand
on cavity searches, sex and egos

ELOQUENT LOTHARIO: Brand

by ERIK LEIJON

Fresh from his scene-stealing performance as lascivious rock star Aldous Snow in the 2008 film Forgetting Sarah Marshall, British comic Russell Brand will be demonstrating his primary vocation in Canada for the first time at this year’s Just for Laughs fest. He’s a peculiar character known for a gaudy fashion sense, an impressive lexicon, an insatiable libido and a sordid past that includes extensive drug use and a criminal rap sheet. His 11 previous arrests as a young heroin-addicted delinquent nearly prevented him from performing in the United States last May.

“I couldn’t take another two hours in one of those rooms, people probing me in my body cavities,” the 33-year old native of Essex said of his uncomfortable meeting with U.S. immigration officials. “It actually happened to me while I was still on the plane, and it was done by another passenger. I don’t know what kind judicial system would allow that.”

The comedian’s career has taken off since he got clean in 2003. He hosts radio and television shows on the BBC, was a Guardian columnist, wrote a controversial autobiography (My Booky Wook) and hosted England’s Big Brother television series. For Canadian audiences, though, it’s his turn as the guy having sex with Kristen Bell in Forgetting Sarah Marshall that served as an introduction to Brand’s primal style of humour.

“A lot of [the Aldous Snow character] is based on me because they rewrote the part after I auditioned for it,” he says. “They altered it to make it more like me: either because they think I’m a fascinating and brilliant man, or they have no faith in my ability to act.” Similar to Snow, Brand is prone to “pseudo-philosophical musings” (as he calls them), and can be quite forthright when it comes to talking about sex, even if he is oddly endearing in his detached attitude.

Horny but wordy

With his Dickensian manner and the accoutrements of a ’70s rock star, Brand is known as being something of a ladies man back in the U.K., where the obsessive British tabloids frequently mock the allegedly sex-crazed Brand. “It’s a really helpful reputation to have when you’re looking for a wife,” he jokes. “I just kind of like girls a lot. I’m always improvising and talking about whatever is on my mind when I’m making jokes. I suppose I talked a little too much about sex and people got the impression that I’m a sex maniac... Sex is good fun, though.” His flamboyant attire may also have something to do with his perceived demeanour—his style of dress usually includes black eyeliner, skintight jeans, cowboy boots and a jungle of un-kept hair.

One attribute Brand doesn’t share with most raunchy comics is the typically limited, expletive-heavy vocabulary. It might just be the British accent, but even his ribald routines sound like he’s reciting Shakespeare. Few people, let alone comics, would refer to the end of a 300-word clipping about him in the Star tabloid as a “denouement.”

“I’m not a terribly focused person, I really only cover the surface of information,” he says. “I read the backs of novels. I look at a few pages of Dostoevsky or BBC movies for a few moments and accumulate as much information as I can.”

Brand vs. Bono and Sir Bob

Although not studious in his harsh school days—he suffered from bulimia as a pudgy teenager—Brand does have a rapier wit, having traded barbs with the likes of Bono and Bob Geldof. As the host of the 2006 NME Awards, Brand said the video feed of a Bono acceptance speech was “live via satellite orbiting around his own ego.” Later in the program, Live Aid founder Geldof referred to the comic as a “cunt,” only to have Brand deliver the reply, “It’s no surprise [Geldof’s] such an expert on famine—after all, he’s been dining out on ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ for 30 years.”

“I think that was my best ever comeback,” Brand proudly says. “I thought of the joke beforehand. I had the intuition that Bob Geldof would say something.” He adds that he hasn’t spoken to the Boomtown Rats frontman since then, seeing as he upstaged him with the killer reply.

As Brand slowly begins to conquer America—his Aldous Snow character will be paired with Superbad star Jonah Hill in an upcoming Apatow buddy pic—the transgressions of his youth will likely become relevant news yet again. As a VJ on MTV in England, he was fired after dressing up in an Osama Bin Laden costume the day after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I was excitable back then,” he recalls, adding, “and I was on crack, which was making me more excitable.”

at the Apatow for Destruction show at
Metropolis (59 Ste-Catherine E.) on
Wednesday, July 16 , 11:59 p.m. $52.85,
and at the Centaur (453 St-François-Xavier)
on thursday, July 17, 9:30 p.m., $36.50