Russell Brand has been all over the news lately, espousing his somewhat vague ideas about the need for a revolution, trying to walk that fine line between “things that need to be said that only an entertainer can say” and “shut up you’re an entertainer.” He’s been promoting both his book, Revolution, and his webshow, The Trews (a mash-up of “True” and “News”), in addition to inventing a new sort of side business of humiliating TV bobbleheads. And now, if he’s to be believed, the side business could become his main gig, as it sounds like he’s not much interested in acting anymore.
As he told the Financial Times in a new interview:
He replies that his chauffeur, Mick, is a really great guy and a friend – which is nice but not the point. What about the beaded necklace, which looks suspiciously like amethyst, that is dangling down towards his soup bowl? How much did that cost?
“Who knows?” he replies as if this were an unfathomable mystery. “I’m not interested in making money any more.”
Does that mean that there will be no more acting, no more Hollywood?
Brand pauses. “It probably does mean that, yes,” he says, hesitantly, as if making up policy on the hoof. But he’s not going to quit comedy, he says, because he loves performing. When I ask how lucrative it is, he shrugs.
“It makes me scared if I think about money too much, then it makes me feel guilty. The only thing I tell the people who look after my money is, ‘Make sure my f*cking taxes are 100 per cent legitimately paid,’ and then I do my own sh*t.”
I’m always torn between wanting to defend some of the legitimate things Russell Brand says to people who would reflexively hate him just for his stupid hair and his phony affected accent and the obnoxious way he pronounces “Ottawa“; and wanting to write him off myself for his tendency to sound like a college freshman who just saw Waking Life. Not too many public figures get as much mileage out of people trying to decide whether they’re an asshole.
“I find [the Financial Times] hard to understand. It obfuscates truth and I think an economic ideology is oppositional to the spiritual ideologies that are what we need to adopt if we’re to save our planet and humankind. Capitalism, the economic arm of the individualism and materialism ideologies that keep us framed in a narrow bandwidth of consciousness, prevents us from seeing that we’re all connected.” [FinancialTimes]
(*long sigh*) Alright, can we do the economic reform without the yoga stuff, please? Anyway, if he does quit acting, I’ll miss his surprisingly understated turns in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him To The Greek, less so Arthur and that TV show he had where he did word association jokes with news headlines and sat on peoples’ laps. That said, I can understand “star of Arthur” being a far less attractive career path than “future cult leader.”
[hat tip: ThePlaylist]