Russell Brand: Sexy Beast
“Did he dare to beep at us?” Brand says.
“Well, he’s a moron, because we didn’t cut him off,” Tom says.
“And we indicated!” Brand says. “And he can see we’re in a learner car. Ungracious bus driver. What does he want, fellatio?” Brand slows to make a right turn, then has to stop for a pedestrian. “Look at him sauntering,” Brand says. “He’s a real fly in the ointment. I’ve never seen such nonsense. It’s the behavior of a Frenchman!”
And so it goes, Brand cracking wise, endlessly, nonstop, unable to help himself even when he’s trying to be serious. Sometimes it’s low-key, like now in the car; other times it’s broader and more profane.
One evening, he’s meeting at his home with the producers of the happiness documentary about their upcoming visit to the Laguna Woods Village retirement community, and one of the producers tells Brand, “Do you know how old you have to be to get in? Only 55.” And then he just sits back, because he knows Brand will see his statement for what it is, a comedic setup.
And indeed Brand does.
“They’re still in the bracket of people I might fuck!” he shouts. “In fact, at that age, they wouldn’t even be the oldest that I have fucked!”
Needless to say, much laughter follows. Of course, given Brand’s current state of betrothal, his “people I might fuck” comment might have been more happily phrased in the past tense. But maybe that’s just what you say when you live out loud the way he does.
(And for the record, the oldest he has had sex with? Oh, around 61.)
Nothing about Brand’s childhood could exactly be considered fun. He was raised in the working-class town of Grays, just east of London, by a single mother who battled cancer and remarried a man he detested. His father, a slippery reprobate, would reappear on and off – to take him to the Far East at the age of 17, for instance, and set him up with all the prostitutes he wanted – good times. But for the most part, Brand was miserable. Unlike the slender, swashbuckling figure of today, the teenage Brand was overweight and uncoordinated – in his words, “tubby and unlovely and odd and obscure and bland.” At the age of seven, he was sexually abused by a tutor who took time out from the lesson to stick his finger up Brand’s rectum (and ever since, Brand has enjoyed having things stuck up there – “That thing is like a turnpike tunnel!” – including, onstage, for comedic effect, a condom-covered Barbie doll). By the age of 14, he was bulimic. He’d come home from school, go to the bathroom and force himself to vomit. He also started cutting his arms in private and in public. Soon enough, he began smoking pot, which eventually led to LSD, cocaine, crack and, of course, his beloved heroin.
He did know how to make people laugh, though. An early amusement involved drawing a face on his penis and showing it to pals. Then, during high school, he acted in his first play and almost immediately decided he was going to be an actor. “You might be as famous as me one day,” he wrote in a friend’s yearbook. “If so, see you at the top. Love, Russ.” From there, he spun through two London drama schools, getting kicked out of both, but not before establishing himself as an oddball freak show to be reckoned with. He took to wearing a long coat he called “the Cloak of Love,” which he used as part of his seduction technique. He turned his acting classes into psychodrama. “He wanted to be Jim Morrison or some bohemian character like that,” a classmate recalled. “He would turn up to rehearsals drunk and then just slash his wrists for the attention.” He excelled in iinprov, but most teachers thought that the most outstanding thing about him was his “sheer laziness and apathy.” One assessment sent to his mother: “What can I say about Russell that won’t upset you? Really, not a lot. I am afraid he has wasted his year at the Academy.”
Once out in the world and on his own, Brand continued in like manner, developed his fondness for heroin and whores, worked on his stand-up act, was a hit at the 2000 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, got hired by MTV as a VJ, got fired by MTV, had many moments of ego- and drug-fueled nastiness, and for a while had his own TV series, RE:Brand, on an obscure British cable channel. The show featured Brand in various escapades. He smoked crack with a prostitute, he jerked off a gay guy, he took a bath with a weeping-sore-ridden homeless man, and in one particularly twisted episode, he staged a boxing match with his father. “I hate myself, I hate being alive,” he told his dad. “And one day, mate? You’ll get a phone call. ‘Russell’s killed himself….’ I don’t really think you’ve ever really given a fuck about me.”
It was a stunning piece of psychological wound-opening, and it briefly showed Brand stripped of his fancy words, as just a hurting little boy. Tellingly, while recounting the incident in his memoirs, he leaves out his words to his father, making it one of the few obvious times he has avoided opening himself up for inspection. And he really does not like talking about his father, other than to say, “He can be funny and warm and engaging and exciting, and I’ve passed the point of wanting to say anything negative about him.” Still, the two only speak occasionally.
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