BRAND AWARENESS
In his new audiobook, Revelation, the comedian-turned-guru explores what’s sacred in life. Here, he riffs on education, reflection and transforming yourself into the person you want to be
The actor-turned-internet sage Russell Brand on how to find meaning in your life
When Russell Brand turned 40, five years ago, he found himself facing a crisis. He felt adrift. He thought, simply enough: “I don’t want to live how I’m living.”
Having risen to fame in the UK as a presenter on MTV and E4 in the early 2000s, Brand attained international celebrity status in 2008, when he played a ramped-up version of himself in the Hollywood romcom Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The next few years were a blur of tabloid and talk-show ubiquity. There was also his brief, high-profile marriage to the pop star Katy Perry. Then, for reasons both voluntary and otherwise, that all went away.
Brand is Zooming from the kitchen of his bucolic Oxfordshire home, where he lives with his wife, Laura, and their two daughters. There are grey streaks in his beard; his hair, still long, stays hidden in his hoody. When he was in the spotlight, Brand says, “There was an obvious cultural template that I was pursuing.” Today, “sitting back, older, with a family”, he wonders what was the real value of that. His crisis, he says, was spurred by the panic that comes with middle age. “It’s the end of fertility, or of virility. It’s the recognition that there is more life behind you than there is in front of you. That sense of: ‘Oh, my God, I’m not ascending!’”
So, he consulted a few men in his recovery community. (Brand has been in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction for 18 years.) One told him, “This is normal. You should feel this. If you didn’t feel it, it would be worrying.”
Brand realised that he needed to come to terms with the death of his fame, because it represented an inauthentic version of himself that he was still, inevitably, drawn to. “It’s a difficult thing to let go of,” he says. “There are some things that I look at and think, ‘That looks so cool!’ I see myself in the tight clothes, or the crazy hair, or the eye make-up, and I think, ‘That, in a way, must have been simpler.’ But a lot of those clothes were a bit tight. And I don’t think those highheeled shoes were good for my lower back.
“You go through little deaths,” he continues. “Little deaths of the phases of your life. Perhaps our progression as individuals is contingent upon our ability to accept that.”
Now 45, Brand has reinvented himself as an internet thinker. Like everyone else, he has a podcast.
Under the Skin with Russell Brand is an interview series in which he reaches towards a “transpolitical and spiritual interpretation of life”. It interrogates “whether there are genuine alternative models to how we organise society and reality”; and it considers the “decentralisation of transnational corporations”.
He stops to laugh. Brand’s latest project, Revelation, was released in
March exclusively by Audible, a subsidiary of Amazon – the biggest transnational corporation of them all. “I recognise I’m working for Audible,” he concedes. “I don’t know what umbrella that comes under!”
Revelation, says Brand, is an exploration of what is most important in our everyday lives. “I’m looking for what’s sacred in my relationship with my wife, with my children, with my work. Otherwise, because I’m a drug addict and selfish, I drift towards not caring. Since I’ve become spiritual, I have found that it’s easier to be alive.”
Turning Inward
While writing Revelation, Brand had grand plans to go out into the world: he wanted to hang with Wim Hof, the ice-plunge influencer, or “do an ayahuasca ceremony” (if his recovery would allow that). But then came the pandemic. Revelation “became a more personal examination” of how to live.
But should Russell Brand be telling people how to live? His public behaviour hasn’t always been aspirational. After he split from Perry at the end of 2011, she told Vogue: “Let’s just say I haven’t heard from him since he texted me saying he was divorcing me.” Meanwhile, his openended investigations of lofty ideas can seem sincere; yet they can also feel flighty, messy and performative.
Yet part of Brand’s charm is that he seems comfortable with the fact that you may never take him seriously. Whether you feel that he has the right to pontificate is your call; he’s not going to push you. “The edicts I’m espousing that I would be comfortable with people living by aren’t mine,” he says. “I try to point out that this is a perennial system of belief that has been found everywhere from Iceland to Tibet.”
“I now have no doubt what the most important things are”
At 40, his crisis year, Brand also had the first of his two children with Laura. “A lot of the clichés have proved true,” he says. “It’s both joyful and exhausting. And when they’re asleep, it’s magic, man.” Parenthood has provided a clear duty and purpose. “I now have no doubt what the most important things are. I would have to make a deliberate choice now to care about other stuff.”
In 2017, Brand enrolled in a Master’s programme – religion in global politics – at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. “I was not as famous as I had been, but pretty famous,” he says. “And I was 20 years older than everybody.” He did his best to hang with the kids. He says his presentations were solid – “I was able to bust out some performance skills” – but the written assignments killed him. “I didn’t finish the course.”
Brand floats his time at university as the kernel of a film: comedian-turnedYouTube sage goes back to school! He’s accepted the death of his old self. But, it seems, it’s nice for him to idly imagine that big-screen return. “I’m sure there’s something in it,” he says, smiling. “It was like a John Hughes movie. Is there a lane for this? Could this work?”