Russell Brand ready to take America by storm

Russell Brand is a busy man, his resume includes being a English radio and television personality, comedian, actor, and newspaper columnist. Though he enjoys massive popularity in the U.K., he’s relatively unknown in the USA. But the well known lothario is now trying establish himself as a star in America. Not unlike the way British soul singer Amy Winehouse impacted the music scene last summer with her retro look and sound, the uniquely coiffed Brand is a big personality that could be a movie star in the making.

“I once heard Matt Groening say that a great cartoon character has to be recognized by its silhouette,” says Brand in joking about his rocker threads, and gravity-defying hair.

But it’s Brand’s ability to shoot from the hip that grabs his comedic peers and audiences.

Success came fast for Brand, who studied at the famed Drama Center in London, an institute that the comedian labels “a get-naked-and-cry drama school.”

After playing a few gigs in 2000, “I found myself in front of an audience of 1,000 at London’s Hackney Empire Theater,” he explains.

Soon after Brand became a host for, MTV in the U.K. and the British version of “Big Brother.” Brand has had his misfires too. He was notoriously once fired by MTV for dressing up as Osama Bin Laden on September 12, 2001. But his dark past has kind of made him into a rock star like legend. He revealed his ferocious appetite for all kinds of illegal drugs and fast women in his hilarious, sometimes brilliant and always indulgent autobiography, My Booky Wook, which was a huge bestseller in Britain last year. He says in My Booky Wook: “My life is just a series of embarrassing incidents strung together by telling people about those embarrassing incidents.”

In 2006, he happened to interview Adam Sandler on his MTV talkshow “1 Leicester Square,” and a friendship ensued. He has been recently spending a lot of time in LA because he is now starring as Adam Sandler’s sidekick in a movie called Bedtime Stories.

Brand credits Sandler with importing him to the States, introducing him to his current agent, Adam Venit, and getting him in front of Judd Apatow. At the casting session for Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the British comedian, confessed that he’d only managed to take a “cursory glance” at the screenplay. Then he added with a flourish, “Would you mind telling me what it’s all about?” Brand’s filter-free personality ultimately inspired producer Judd Apatow and writer-headliner Jason Segel to rewrite the role of Aldous Snow, the rock star who steals Kristen Bell away in the recent “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” Apparently, before Brand was cast, the character was meant to be “a bookish sort of author”, Brand recently revealed, “but they rewrote the part for me and they gave me loads of room to improvise”. Before they started shooting the film last summer, in Hawaii, they rehearsed for two weeks, “so there was time to develop the character — or, in my case, to undevelop the character… until it’s exactly like me”.

Conceived by Brand, the character isn’t that far from his true self: outspoken, an ex-heroin addict and sexually blatant with a nod to his rocker mates Morrissey and Noel Gallagher. Brand will resurrect Snow in Apatow’s next production, “Get Him to the Greek,” a dirty take on “Almost Famous.”

Brand’s also kept writing his weekly football column, for The Guardian newspaper. He’s doing another series of Ponderland for Channel 4, some stand-up and another book. He’s also going to South America to make a documentary about “revolution” and meet people like the Venezue-lan president Hugo Chavez, if there are any other people like Hugo Chavez. And he and the film director Michael Winterbottom have finished the first draft of a script adapted from My Booky Wook.
Brand knows that getting attuned to what works with live audiences is critical to his success or failure in America. What Brand has been able to do, more successfully than perhaps any modern comedian, is to strip away all boundaries between his private and public personas.
“Stand-up is the spine of everything I do, it’s me in a relationship with an audience, because that’s what I like best, where there’s no filter,” he says. “My intention is to do films in tandem with stand-up comedy. The role models are Rich-ard Pryor, Woody Allen, Steve Martin. There exists a clear template in American entertainment that doesn’t exist in the UK. Pryor, really, he’s my hero in all of that.”