Rolling Stone Magazine’s Russel Brand Interview
[From Issue 1061 — September 18, 2008.]
We heard that while you were filming commercials for the VMAs with Britney Spears, you were telling her shocking things you wanted to do to her.
I did describe one very basic sexual technique, which I think she would have hugely benefited from — just standard clitoral stimulation whilst achieving an upward, diagonal motion so that you can induce anal and clitoral stimulation simultaneously. But I wasn’t able to demonstrate, so it was a dismal failure.
You’ve had a fraught history with MTV. When you worked for the network in the U.K., you were fired for showing up to work dressed as Osama bin Laden — on September 12th, 2001. What were you thinking?
I was taking loads of crack and heroin. And I was a little bit excited because I’d been talking about Osama bin Laden for ages before that, right? So it was kind of like when a band breaks that you’ve liked for ages. I was like, “I told you this guy was gonna be big!” Still, what I did was deeply regrettable. I mean no disrespect to the thousands who lost their lives in that terrible tragedy. It was a very, very stupid thing to have done.
You’ve been pretty open about your history with drugs and bulimia and sex addiction in your memoir, “My Booky Wook.” Did you draw on your own life when you were acting as the rock star Aldous Snow in “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”?
Yeah. Nicholas Stoller, the director of that film, and Jason Segel, the writer, plundered my life like British archeologists picking through a pyramid: “What else happened? What else did you do?”
What’s one of the better stories you told them?
When I was making RE: BRAND, a TV show that was inspired by Jackass, I was doing all these insane things, like having a bath with a homeless man whose ulcerated legs were weeping into the water. And I smoked crack with a prostitute and her family. During that time, we were on tour in this Winnebago, and I drank a bottle of gin first thing in the morning to steady my nerves. It made me incredibly emotional, and I was crying. I climbed on top of the Winnebago. I said, “Film me!” And the film crew said, “We can’t film you on a moving vehicle, it’s against regulations!” So I said, “You make me sick!” and stuck my fingers down my throat and started puking, but there was nothing to come out except fumes. So I tried to vomit fumes on the production company as a punishment for not having trust. Then this whole shoot was canceled, and several of my friends lost their jobs. My solution was to say, “Let’s just not tell our mums.”














