Kristen Bell and Russell Brand forget Sarah Marshall Photo: Alamy
This role was originally intended for a young Hugh Grant type: bookish, eloquent and dashing in loafers and tweed. When writing the 2008 comedy Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Jason Segel wanted to subject his hapless hero to the ultimate romantic humiliation—and having his girlfriend kidnapped by a vivacious English bestselling author was the worst scenario he could come up with.
But who will play him? Segel, director Nicholas Stoller and producer Judd Apatow auditioned several new British arrivals to Hollywood for the role. (Charlie Hunnam, then 26 and on the verge of his breakthrough role in the biker gang series Sons of Anarchy, was an early favorite.) But then something strange happened at the casting. A candidate who was not even remotely suitable — he was a disheveled Byronic type who spoke with a strong regional accent — stalked into the room and took the three men by surprise.
“It was fantastic,” Stoller gushed as the rest of the room applauded after the 32-year-old improvised a monologue in which he tried to convince a reluctant lover to join him on a horseback riding trip. journey. Apatow contacted the candidate's agent to make the necessary arrangements, and Siegel rushed home overnight to rewrite the script around the performer.
After the film's release, Siegel reflected in a radio interview about what prompted his creative turn. “I can’t imagine anyone being more jealous or afraid of dating your new girlfriend,” he explained, “than Russell Brand.”
The Dispatches, Times and Sunday Times investigation into Brand's alleged serious sexual misconduct over a seven-year period made much of allegations of complicity by his employers at the BBC and Channel 4, which were said to be too happy at the height of their fame to shut down eyes on your misdeeds. Both broadcasters are launching investigations to find out «if any complaints from Brand's alleged victims were turned a blind eye.» (Brand denied the allegations in the video, calling them a «coordinated attack» that included «some very serious allegations that I absolutely deny.»)
But Hollywood played an equally decisive role in strengthening Brand's star image as a brave Lothario whose behavior was impeccable — and, remarkably, , all of the abuses described in the investigation reportedly took place during this golden period of Hollywood.
By the mid-aughts, Brand's charming roguish act had been cleverly tailored to different demographics of the domestic market. He hosted Big Brother's Big Mouth, had his own anarchic talk show on MTV and wrote a weekly football column for the Guardian.
But apart from playing Flash Harry of Essex in the 2007 remake of St Trinian's (a role originated by George Cole in the 1950s and 1960s films), it hasn't been easy to land prominent acting roles at home. As his stand-up comedy and performances proved, Brand was truly only capable of playing versions of himself. Moreover, those around him began to worry that Brand's behavior with women might derail his career before it could reach its fullest and most profitable form. Therefore, after spending time in a sex addiction clinic under the strict guidance of his agent John Noel, he went to Hollywood.
Brand's success there matched the pattern set by other British comedians — such formidable talents as Peter Sellers, Billy Connolly and Dudley Moore — who, a generation earlier, had also suddenly found themselves in the spotlight of the film establishment. Moreover, he knew how to make money from this cultural heritage.
Russell Brand and Jonah Hill launch the “Get Him To” campaign The Grek» in London Photo: Alamy
«Americans: What are their views on people from the United Kingdom?» he mused in a 2008 Guardian interview. “They were probably told about Monty Python, rock and roll and Victorian England. If your character has those qualities, they'll go away, okay, I know what that is.”
However, unlike Sellers, he did not have the range of Doctor Strangelove or the sensitivity of the Presence There. And unlike Moore, his established comic personality meant you wouldn't believe him as a Bedazzled-style romantic loser, let alone as an elf in Santa's workshop. (Although you could imagine him more or less as Arthur, more on that later.) As for Connolly: well, the thought of him in Mrs. Brown be damned. Instead, studios paid him millions to essentially play himself.
Who is this, for example? «One day I was watching the news and I saw footage of a war and I think it was Darfur or Zimbabwe or Rwanda or one of them and I thought, 'This isn't right, is it?' ? And I made several phone calls, and it turned out that this was not the case.»
Or this: «I'd rather have my testicles spread out like a wafer and then covered in a layer of honey, and then the wasps come and sting me, and then cover them with another layer of vinegar, and then a Nazi puts it on like a swimming cap — I'd rather have that than spend another second with her.»
They sound like something out of Brand's stand-up routine. But both are actually Aldous Snow, his character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and its 2010 semi-sequel, Get Him to the Greek. Snow was more of a rock star than a comedian, but in other ways he was Brand through and through: a newly sober, compulsive Casanova with an eloquent speaking style and intellectual affectations (his band's name, Infant Sorrow, came from Blake). In the second film, his pop star girlfriend Jackie Q, played by Rose Byrne, bore more than a passing resemblance to Katy Perry, who was Brand's own wife, albeit briefly, at the time of the film's release.
When Stoller wrote Take Him to the Greek, in which Aldous relapses, he used Brand's 2007 memoir My Bukky-ook as a reference guide—though in both films he was allowed to rework his dialogue as he saw fit. “It was like being a spoiled, precocious, pampered child,” he told an Australian women's magazine about filming Forgetting Sarah Marshall. “Everything I said was applauded and celebrated.”
And they were generously rewarded. In 2009, he bought himself a £2.2 million Los Angeles home in the hipster area of Los Feliz and two years later moved into a £4 million Hollywood Hills estate with Perry. And his post-divorce bachelor pad, bought a year later, was a £1.8 million modernist bunker just down the road.
Russell Brand as Aldous Snow in Take Him to Greece
At the time, a series of animated vocal performances helped increase his income. Inexplicably, he played an ancient mad scientist in three Minions films, a hippie turncoat in Trolls, and voiced the Easter Bunny in the devilish Hop. He also had a leading supporting role in the musical Rock of Ages, where he appeared alongside Tom Cruise. his years of Hollywood glory came to an abrupt end.
That film was Arthur: Warner Bros.' ill-fated remake of the 1981 comedy. in 2011, which turned the «likable» Dudley Moore from a national treasure to an international one and secured him a Best Actor nomination. Brand's well-publicized history of addiction made him look like a worthy candidate to play the lovable playboy who realizes the mistakes of his drunken lifestyle. But Brand based his entire performance on incorrigibility, and he simply lacked the acting chops to play anything else.
Russell Brand with Helen Mirren in «Arthur»
This bloody attempt to «make Brand a reality» was a classic case of Hollywood overexertion: audiences and critics refused, and the project imploded before almost everyone's eyes. (Only one person escaped with her dignity intact, and that was the actress who played Brand's love interest: Step Up, then-indie starlet and now billion-dollar box office Barbie director, Greta Gerwig.)
In typical pan, David Edelstein of New York magazine bluntly described Brand's performance as «career-killing» — and so it turned out, although the death throes continued until 2019, when he was cast as a suspect in Kenneth Branagh's film adaptation of Death on the Nile «. By the time the film was actually released in 2022, Brand had made his latest career turn as a struggling YouTube conspirator, and his presence—especially in such a subdued role—looked downright absurd.
However, like his YouTube channel, Brand has always viewed Hollywood as a machine for laundering and cleaning up his public image. This new phase, he told US radio in an interview after the Saxgate scandal in 2008, would give him a «reptilian opportunity to shed parts of [his] skin» that he no longer liked, adding that «this particularly quirky part of my English eccentricity is now will be a central part of the Brand. And the studios — even though they were paid for it — were only too happy to play along.
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