Russell Brand: From Bad Boy to Golden Boy
Russell Brand on Get Him To The Greek, partying with P Diddy, his cat Morrissey's pet passport and touching Helen Mirren's bras.
From bad boy to the golden boy, Katy Perry’s in Rajasthan last month.
When you’ve gone from womanising drug addict to world-class comedic actor who’s dating one of the most attractive and successful women in the world, you can afford to be a little bit smug, and that’s what FHM was expecting when we met 35-year-old Russell Brand to talk about his role in Get Him To The Greek . Irritatingly, he was charming, very funny, humble, extremely intelligent and satisfyingly saucy. He talked to us about kicking back with P Diddy, pet passports and playing with Helen Mirren’s bras…
So what was P Diddy like to work with?
It was an incredible experience, I suppose because I didn’t ever anticipate working with a hip-hop mogul. I’m impressed by characters who mould reality according to their will and I can think of no finer example than P Diddy.
He could probably have bought the film if he wanted to…
Yeah, “Could we buy this film and make it into something else? It’s a shoe shop now…”
Obviously you’ve led what our mum would call “a life”, but didn’t Puffy take you partying to research the life of a rock star?
Yeah, I went over for a weekend in Vegas with him when Ricky Hatton was fighting Manny Pacquiao. I remember seeing the pictures of me at the fight with Jay-Z and Diddy in the papers the next day and thinking, “This is going to look a bit off key back in England”.
If you win an Oscar one day, will you play the acceptance for laughs or will you be all earnest?
If for some reason I got an Oscar I would feel an incredible obligation to not be sincere, but I’ve heard that this sincerity sneaks in insidiously. It gets you all amped up and you go nuts. If I win one, I promise not to be sincere. I promise to devalue that ceremony and everything it stands for.
You’ve got a couple of films coming up with Helen Mirren in. Is she as brilliant as she seems?
Every bit. I did The Tempest and that’s where I first met her. She couldn’t have been more charming, sexy, convivial and brilliant. She just put me at ease. I couldn’t have been more willing to have a peculiar oedipal bath with that woman. I was at a costume fitting for Arthur and they had the bras hanging up that she’d be wearing and I thought, ‘I’m going to go and touch them bras’. So I did and she was there and she saw me doing it. She just let me get away with it. They’d not been on her yet, but they will be. I touched her boob space.
You spend a lot of time in America now. What do you always take with you?
What I’ve now taken over is Morrissey, my cat.
But how does he get back?
He doesn’t. He’s staying there now, unless there’s a serious turnaround, but he’s got a pet passport now, so…
So he can come and go as he pleases?
Well, there are limitations. He can’t do it without my aid or without my permission. Even if I’m not living there and someone says, “Morrissey seems to be indicating that he wants to come to London,” if I go, “Absolutely not,” there’s no way that he can veto that.
From the November 2010 issue of FHM India.
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