Mike Hosking interviews Russell Brand 12th March 2020
It may seem extraordinary now, but just over a decade ago, Hollywood tried, and seemingly failed, to make Russell Brand a film star. He was admittedly excellent in a supporting role as a narcissistic rock star in 2008′s Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but everything else that he appeared in was either a disappointment or an outright flop, including the ill-advised 2011 remake of the Dudley Moore comedy classic Arthur.
In it, Brand starred opposite Greta Gerwig, who is having an annus mirabilis thanks to her writing and directing the year’s biggest hit, Barbie. However, the new allegations that have been levelled at Brand by Channel 4′s Dispatches, which include an allegation of rape and accusations of sexual assault and abusive and controlling behaviour between the period 2006 and 2013, have meant that this year is an annus horribilis for the once-beloved comedian, writer and podcaster, after years of internet rumours.
The allegations that Brand is accused of, including forced oral sex with a teenager who he allegedly called “the child” and the claim that he threatened legal action against one woman that he allegedly sexually assaulted in order for her not to make her allegations public, surely spell the lowest point of his career; if, of course, he has chosen not to have a mainstream career anymore, given that most of his activities these days seem to involve broadcasting increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories, mostly revolving around “the Great Reset”, on his and others’ YouTube platforms.
More than one of the anonymous women making allegations against Brand described how it was as if “a different person literally entered his body”.
The three-time “Shagger of the Year”, as he was christened by The Sun, has formally denied all the accusations against him and fought back pre-emptively against the allegations, releasing a video on Friday night in which he railed against “a mainstream media TV company” which has launched a “litany of extremely egregious and aggressive attacks” against him.
Depending on how the allegations are received, this move may prove brilliant or simply foolhardy. Yet ever since his emergence in public life two decades ago, Brand has delighted in causing outrage and controversy everywhere he has been, and has only managed to get away with his often offensive and unpleasant behaviour because he was a star.
Russell Brand in 2015. Photo / AP
As one anonymous female comedian has said: “He should never have got to Hollywood - his behaviour should have stopped that - [but] he was able to become a Hollywood star and do so well out of it.”
He is far from stupid, writing in his irritatingly-titled 2007 memoir, My Booky Wook: “What I’ve learnt - to my cost - on several occasions in my life, is that people will put up with all manner of bad behaviour so long as you’re giving them what they want. They’ll laugh and get into it and enjoy the anecdotes and the craziness and the mayhem as long as you’re doing your job well, but the minute you’re not, you’re f****d. They’ll wipe their hands of you without a second glance.”
What he forgot to say was that his “bad behaviour” has made him look like an apparently deeply damaged man.
Here are 11 of his most notorious acts and statements:
Dressing up as Osama Bin Laden (2001)
MTV hired Brand as a video journalist in 2000, in the hope that the comedian would bring an edgy quality to the channel. He did, but not in the way that they had anticipated. After he was arrested for stripping naked at a Mayday protest in 2001, something that he later called “a combination of youthful idealism and personal exhibitionism”, Brand - by his own admission, a heavy user of heroin at this point - decided, the day after 9/11, that it would be funny if he turned up at work dressed as Osama Bin Laden.
His superiors were unamused by the bad-taste costume, and he was duly fired two days later. It was unsurprising to find, in 2014, that Brand declared on Newsnight that he considered it debatable that it was the American government behind the attacks, calling himself “open-minded to any kind of possibility”.
Noel Gallagher (left) and Russell Brand during Russell Brand's XFM radio show, at Global Radio, in central London. Photo / Getty Images
Reading pornography out loud on XFM (2002)
The journalist Miranda Sawyer once pithily described Brand’s career trajectory as following a predictable path: “get hired, get cocky, get sacked”. This was true of his time at MTV, and, boldly - some would say unaccountably - he was hired by the then XFM (nowRadio X) in 2002, only to be fired almost immediately when he decided to delight his listeners by reading out soft-core pornography live on air, as well as bringing in homeless people into the studio to broadcast with him, apparently on a whim.
Brand confessed to Oprah Winfrey in 2014 that he was “infatuated with pornography” from an early age, as well as hooked on drugs at this time, but he was later forgiven by Radio X and rehired as a presenter in 2017, promising that he would offer “joy, unity and togetherness” on his show. It is now on indefinite hiatus, and has been since January 2018. It has been stated that, when Brand worked on BBC Radio 6, he behaved in an aggressive and abusive way towards his colleagues, throwing objects across the studio in “fits of rage” and urinating in a bottle in front of others.
Insulting Bob Geldof (2006)
The NME Awards have always been a magnet for controversy, thanks to their combination of boozed-up musicians and general licentiousness, but it was a sober Brand who took to the stage in 2006 to welcome “Sir Bobby Gandalf”. The gag was not welcome - especially as there were unfounded rumours that Brand had been involved with Geldof’s daughter Peaches - and so when the Boomtown Rats singer arrived onstage, he declared: “Russell Brand, what a c--t.”
The abusive riposte did, at least, provoke one of Brand’s wittier comebacks, when he said: “Really, it’s no surprise that he’s such an expert on famine. He has been dining out on I Don’t Like Mondays for 30 years.” He later fell out with Geldof’s daughter Fifi in 2015 after making inappropriate jokes about drug-taking at - of all things - a narcotics and alcohol addiction charity fundraiser; she labelled him an “uber-douche extraordinaire” and said that she was “less of a Russell Brand fan than ever”.
Fawlty Towers, starring Andrew Sachs and John Cleese, was named the best British sitcom.
Although there was significant outcry that led to Brand resigning from his job as a BBC radio presenter and Ross - then the highest-paid broadcaster in the country - being suspended without pay for 12 weeks, both men were defended by the likes of Noel Gallagher and Jimmy Carr, as well, more surprisingly, by Charlie Brooker, who said “people who retrospectively complain to Ofcom about material they’ve only read about second-hand are, in essence, a bunch of sanctimonious cry-babies indulging in a wretched form of masturbation”.
Nonetheless, the BBC Trust described the calls as “a deplorable intrusion with no editorial justification”. Today, it’s doubtful that either man would last a day after such behaviour.
Insulting George W. Bush (2008)
As if offending significant swathes of his own countrymen wasn’t enough for one year, while Brand was presenting the MTV Video Awards in September 2008, he openly urged his audience to vote for Barack Obama and said, of claims that America was too racist to elect a black president, “I know America to be a forward-thinking country because otherwise why would you have let that retard and cowboy fella be President for eight years?”
He then quipped: “We thought it was nice of you to let him have a go because, in England, he wouldn’t be trusted with a pair of scissors.”
Brand was on particular form that evening, also laying into the Jonas Brothers for their much-cherished “purity rings”, holding one up and saying that he had won it from one of the brothers backstage. When this was met with booing, he commented: “I’d like to take this opportunity to say, no one ever have sex again. It’s a mad idea. What a way to spend an evening!” Had he taken his own advice, things would have been very different.
Joking about drugs (2010)
For a man who has been vocal about his drug addiction and the benefits of sobriety, Brand has certainly found the subject to be a fertile one for his comic reflections. In 2010, in an interview with Rolling Stone, he said: “The top of the hit parade would look very different if teenyboppers were exposed to heroin. It would weed a lot of them out.”
Describing the likelihood of young men and women overdosing as a form of “Darwinian selection”, and declaring “All children should be made to listen to music by people who wrote it on acid while staring wistfully at water”, his comments led, predictably, to outrage, with a spokesman from the Drug Prevention Alliance slating his “mindless idiocy” and “desperate attention-seeking”. The latter, at least, is a Brand trademark.
Singer Katy Perry and actor Russell Brand arrive at the 2010 Vanity Fair Oscar Party. Photo / Getty Images
Divorcing Katy Perry (2011)
At the peak of his stardom, Brand married the pop singer Katy Perry, but later divorced her a mere 14 months later, sending her a text on New Year’s Eve 2011 telling her that the marriage was over. He later described their marriage as a “time that I remember has been a little bit chaotic”. She said, of their break-up: “I was in bed for about two weeks. I was pretty f****d, yes. It hurt a lot.”
Although Brand initially paid lip service to saying only positive things about his former wife, commenting to Ellen De Generes that “I was very happy to be married to her. She’s such a beautiful human being and I have only love and positivity for her”, he ungallantly remarked later: “I’d be having sex thinking, ‘think of anyone, anyone else’.”
Causing outrage at the GQ Awards (2013)
The GQ awards have seen their share of controversy in the past, because of the combination of high-profile celebrities and copious amounts of alcohol, but it was an entirely sober Brand who took to the stage in 2013 and remarked that the event’s sponsor Hugo Boss had made “f***ing fantastic” uniforms for the Nazis, before ostentatiously goose-stepping, much to the horror of the audience.
When confronted by the magazine’s editor Dylan Jones, who told him “what you did was very offensive to Hugo Boss”, Brand replied: “What Hugo Boss did was very offensive to the Jews”.
It fell to The Daily Telegraph’s former editor and columnist Charles Moore, at the ceremony to receive the writer of the year award, to put Brand in his place, saying, “I was very interested when Russell Brand chose to praise the stylishness of the Nazis. Because of course that fits with the fact that when they persecuted the Sachs family in the 1930s, Andrew Sachs, who was only young, then fled to this country. He was then persecuted by Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross in their disgusting phone call.” The applause was tumultuous.
Interviewing Ed Miliband (2015)
The journalist Owen Jones notoriously declared in 2015 that “Russell Brand has endorsed Labour - and the Tories should be worried.” Brand’s politics are unpredictable, to put it mildly, but in what was believed to be a knife-edge election in 2015, it was felt that he commanded a significant amount of the youth vote, largely through his YouTube series The Trews, and so Ed Miliband, the-then Labour leader, was invited on to his show for a 15-minute interview,.
During the interview, the uncomfortable-looking politician adopted an Estuary English accent, asked Brand why he had previously told his followers not to vote - about which subject the comedian had argued with Jeremy Paxman in 2013, after saying that he “couldn’t be arsed” to vote and that the whole process was “irrelevant” - and attempted to plug his party’s policies, before the comedian offered Miliband his support. In the end, it made little difference, and David Cameron’s dismissal of Brand as “a joke” may have been a more prescient remark than the-then Prime Minister knew.
Russell Brand and Laura Gallacher take their baby daughter Mabel for a stroll round Primrose Hill. Photo / Getty Images
Nappy-changing (2019)
After Brand divorced Perry, he married the “lifestyle blogger” Laura Gallacher and moved to Oxfordshire, but still apparently took care to maintain a suitably hands-off detachment from day-to-day chores.
In an interview with The Times, in which he described himself as a feminist - ironically, in view of recent revelations - he confessed that he left all the domestic chores to his wife (and, presumably, their household staff), saying: “I’m focused on mystical connotations of Mabel’s beauty and grace. Not so good on the nappies and making sure they eat food.”
In The Guardian earlier this year, the environmentalist George Monbiot solemnly declared that “if, as I suspect it might, politics takes a very dark turn in the next few years, it will be partly as a result of people like Brand”. Monbiot, who was once an avid supporter of the activist, tore into him for his proclaiming the truth of “tired and discredited tales”, and expressed his disbelief that Brand appeared to condone such right-wing figures as Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.
The writer sadly concluded: “He has, in this respect, become the opposite of what he was.” Most would agree that Brand - who has frequently attacked Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Bill Gates - has evolved in a very strange direction indeed, but perhaps this is all of a piece with this troubled, unsavoury character.
He might rail against the “MSM” or mainstream media, but the increasingly-strange diatribes that he comes out with on his YouTube channel are lapped up by his target audience. Whether they will still stick with him after the new revelations - and dismiss the stories, as Brand has done, as “astonishing, rather baroque attacks” - will be seen soon.
