Russell Brand, born again

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0:53I'm ready. Heavenly Father, thank you for this chance for us to be together where two or more have gathered, you are present, Lord. This is how the comedian and YouTuber Russell Brand started his interview on Tucker Carlson's podcast just a few weeks ago. Can you help me, Lord, not to look at Tucker as a person that exists for my benefit or to facilitate me, but to know that he is, like me, a person that's broken and that will die one day and that we're here to love one another and serve one another. And by the way we love one another, they will know that we are in you and that you are in us, Lord.

1:24Here at The Global Story, We don't exist for anyone's benefit except our listeners, and we're not here to facilitate anyone either except today's episode, which is about the many, many incarnations of Russell Brand. Very clever. Russell Brand has been a stand-up, a TV presenter, a self-declared addict, author, Hollywood film star, a podcaster who says he seeks to challenge mainstream media narratives, and now a new face. Russell Brand is facing trial in the UK in October on multiple counts of rape and sexual assault, which he denies. And in the United States, he's relaunching his career as a Christian influencer.

2:06From the BBC, I'm Tristan Redman in London. And I'm Asma Khaled in Washington, D.C. And today on The Global Story, Russell Brand's biblical rebrand.

2:21A heads up before we start, this episode contains references to drug abuse, so take care while listening. We have to state at the start of this episode that Russell Brown has been charged with three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault and one of indecent assault in the UK. He's pleaded not guilty to all charges. His trial is due to start in October of this year. And a particularity of UK law means that we cannot say anything about that case while it's ongoing. So we're going to proceed on that basis. And I'm very pleased to say that we're joined by the BBC's media editor, Katie Razzle.

3:02Katie, so good to have you with us. Great to be back. Thanks for asking me. Katie, Russell Brand has lived many lives in the public eye. Some would say many rebrands, many rebirths. Can you begin by just telling us how he first became famous? Well, yes. I mean, back then it was actually a fairly well-trodden route. So he started off doing comedy shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which is the big festival in the summer that happens every year in Scotland and has made the careers of lots of comedians. And he continued doing stand-up comedy. I'm talking about, you know, the kind of early 2000s and was then hired by MTV as a presenter.

3:41He's becoming more and more known by people. But he, you know, did then say after 9-11, the day off 9-11, he turned up at MTV dressed as Osama bin Laden and he said he was fired for that. Now, before I talk about this, remember, I was on crack and heroin, Chelsea. And I challenge any of you to take crack and heroin and see how it affects your personal, private and professional life. And after that, he did in fact go into rehab for his addiction to various drugs. So it didn't all go without controversy, but comedy is like that, isn't it? If you're a comedian, you're always trying to push the boundaries.

4:19And Russell Brand did that almost on every appearance and every job he ever did.

4:29Fiddlesticks, I had a guinea on her to claim first prize. I mean, he's a guy who's been around in the British public forum for a long time. I mean, I remember he came on my radar probably in the mid 2000s when he did a spin off show attached to that reality TV show Big Brother. Thank you. Cheers. Hello. Hello. Hola amigos. Je vous draille Russell. And then there was a controversial moment, maybe his most controversial moment in his early career, when he got a show on the BBC Radio 2, which is, for our American listeners, is one of the biggest radio stations in the country. And he was a DJ and his show ran for a few years until a fateful moment when he made a phone call to a guy called Andrew Sachs.

5:22What, this is Andrew Sachs' answer phone? Right, Jonathan, well, this is unconventional. I'll blow something out. Don't. Not on the answer phone, Jonathan. Sorry, I can't answer at the moment. Now, Andrew Sachs, how do you describe Andrew Sachs, Katie? Well, Andrew Sachs was known to every Brit, certainly, and probably people further afield, because he was an actor who was in Fawlty Towers. People might remember that British comedy starring John Cleese. A kind of cult 1970s show. When you've left your message, just hang up or for more options, press one at any time. Hello, Andrew Sachs. This is Russell Brand.

5:59I'm a great appreciator of your work over decades. He made this phone call in which he basically goaded this man, Andrew Sachs, about the fact that he had claimed to have had sex with his granddaughter. Put the phone down! Put the phone down! Code red! Code red! I'm sorry, Mr Fonty, I'm sorry. You're a waste of space. Oh no, Jonathan! Why did you tell me? I forgot. You were talking about he's great. You mentioned her and then it was in my head and then it came out. I know. You can't be blamed for this. You're just trying to argue. And the co-host at that point on that day was Jonathan Ross, who's also a very famous TV presenter and still is now.

6:35But they left a series of messages on Andrew Sacks' answer machine. It was broadcast. So clearly whatever BBC systems were in place did not work because it went out. And then the newspaper, the Mail on Sunday kind of reported on it. And there were huge numbers of complaints, I think 40 ,000 complaints to the BBC. And the BBC apologised and Russell Brand had to resign, as did the Radio 2 controller, Leslie Douglas. And Jonathan Ross, actually, who also worked for the BBC, was suspended for three months. But Russell Brand at that point, you know, he did apologise. But he did also say during his last show on the station that the messages were funny.

7:12And so he lost his career then at that point with the BBC. He did lose his career in the sense that, yeah, he had to leave. but it didn't seem to impact him as much as you might imagine. He almost got more famous after that, didn't he? Well, I think there is that old adage, there's no such thing as bad publicity and perhaps that really, you know, he personifies that in a way because he became notorious for what happened and that just added to his fame. So, you know, he'd already done one movie, in fact, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which is an American film. I haven't seen it. But Hollywood came back to him, you know, after he had to resign.

7:48He ends up getting married quite briefly to the pop star Katy Perry. And that's because they meet on the sequel to the first Hollywood movie he did. It was a sequel called Get Him to the Greed. Can we please go? Doesn't it make sense that we would stay here and have the time of your life? And then, you know, pretty soon. And he played this lewd rock star persona in that film, right? And after that, they start dating. And a year later, they married in this traditional Hindu ceremony in India, in Rajasthan. Katie, I was asking him how much he'd learned about music from you. He taught me about music, actually.

8:27Hopefully my record will be good now because of it. Thank you. I like to think I'm an influence. Because my comedy now is all about sort of domesticity and looking after cats and burglar alarms and all cleaning your teeth together. when he was about roaring through the London streets with razor blades and ticker tape and glitter all over your tongue. And they married and, you know, fairly soon split up. And, in fact, hideous moment, he dumps her by text in 2011 just as she was about to go on stage. And I think she has said, possibly he has said, they have not spoken since. So this was not a...

9:04Since the text message? I think not. Wow. That era of him starring in Hollywood movies and his brief marriage to Katy Perry, though, did make him more of a figure, I would say, in American culture, right? You mentioned that he's a British guy, and I think he increasingly has become well-known here in the United States, and part of that was that era. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. So not only was he, you know, had Hollywood come back to him, and also his stand-up tours got bigger, so the notoriety increased his ticket sales, and he'd already released one book, and then he released the second one, book he worked to and in that was talking about orgies and celebrity encounters including sleeping with Kate Moss the model and in a way he's one of those people who it felt as if he was an honest person in the sense that he was being very open not just about his addictions but also about the sex he had the relationships he had it was all on the surface and felt like he was a exposing his life in a kind of honest, meaningful way.

10:06And I guess he had an appeal. He's incredibly charismatic. And he talks a lot. He talks a lot. And people started to listen to him when he went through, you know, he's one of these people who's had lots of iterations. And when he was in a sort of political campaigner, man of the people phase, which he might say he's still in. Well, yeah, I mean, I remember that very vividly around. I mean, it kind of started in the mid 20 teens and then became a really big thing around the general election. He became a political player somehow. What do you remember about that, Katie? He absolutely was. So I was about to arrive at BBC Newsnight, which is a flagship show on the BBC and News and Current Affairs programme.

10:47And just before I arrived, so I know it was 2013, he had done an interview with Jeremy Paxman, who was a very famous news presenter in Britain. Russell Brand, who are you to edit a political Well, I suppose like a person who's been politely arsed by an attractive woman. And he told Jeremy Paxman that he didn't think people should vote, that he'd never voted and he didn't think people should vote. And Jeremy Paxman gave him a hard time about it. You've never ever voted? No, do you think that's really bad? So you struck an attitude, what, before the age of 18? Well, I was busy being a drug addict at that point because I come from the kind of social conditions that are exacerbated by an indifferent system that really just administrates for large corporations and ignores the population that it was voting in to serve.

11:31You're blaming the political class for the fact that you had a drug problem? But actually, it's quite interesting because afterwards, I saw something that Jeremy Paxman said where he essentially said, you know, we ought to admit it, the Daily Mail columnist may think Russell Brown the spawn of the devil, but there is something irresistible about him. The energy, the loquacity, the camp manner, the apparent frankness, he stands squarely in the British tradition of cheeky chappies. Katie, when you say that Russell Brand came out and said there was no point in voting, how were his politics perceived at the time?

12:03Left-leaning, anti-establishment, fighting for the common man and woman, the poor, the disaffected, people. So he's quite a figure. Absolutely, left-leaning. And he said, you know, I come from that kind of background and talked about his difficult childhood and his experience growing up in Essex, not in a poor household. On the long and winding road of Russell Brand's various life transformations, the next big one would seem to be during the pandemic in 2021. He kind of repositioned himself. Yeah, so he ends up positioning himself as a vaccine sceptic and questions whether the virus was real. So he's doing more videos along those lines.

12:53What do you think about the news regarding this pandemic? Do you think you're being told the truth? Do you think you're being told the whole truth? And do you think that healthy debate and conversation is being encouraged or stifled? I think, you know, his position is, you know, strongly distrusting governments. Well, that wasn't a shift, as well as strongly distrusting the media and institutions. That is dictatorship because nobody can claim from a religious or political or any ideological perspective to have sole exclusive access to truth. Truth is complicated. Yes, he criticised lockdown policies and on vaccine policies.

13:31I mean, he said he was asking questions rather than making direct claims, but of course critics. His critics accused him of spreading misleading or false information. And in fact, YouTube took down one of his videos citing its policy on medical misinformation. Is that when he gets excluded from YouTube and starts to broadcast on Rumble instead? Yes, exactly right. So Rumble is, I mean, think YouTube. So it's a video sharing platform. It's Canadian based. It describes itself as the kind of free speech alternative. That it's immune to cancel culture. Exactly. Immune to cancel culture. And, you know, it's worth pointing out Russell Brand has more than two million followers on Rumble.

14:14So he's certainly not cancelled. So he's definitely not cancelled. Actually, when I was researching some of this, I was looking at he had 1.4 million followers a few years ago, and now he's got 2 million. So he definitely, there's been a trajectory and it's been up. It's certainly not been down. Okay, then in 2023, some UK newspapers, the Times of London and the Sunday Times and Channel 4, released the findings of a joint investigation. He denied all these allegations. And the night before publication, he posted a video stating that all of his relationships had been consensual. He accused the media of a, quote, coordinated attack.

14:53And he said, quote, amidst this litany of astonishing, rather baroque attacks are some very serious allegations that I absolutely refute. What happened to his career after that journalistic investigation was published? Well, it wasn't great for him, obviously. I mean, he was dropped by his agent and also dropped by the publishing company. With him, he had a two-book deal. And the Metropolitan Police launched an investigation. So a few months after this happened, he was baptised in the River Thames by Bear Grylls. If people know, is Bear Grylls a figure around the world? I don't think outside of the UK.

15:34He's like a survivalist asthma. He's a guy who goes into the wilderness and, you know, eats trees and things like that. But being baptized in the River Thames is quite significant. And, I mean, you've painted a picture also of a Russell Brand who really built his career on being a comedian, a lewd comedian at times, being rather candid about some of his sexual exploits and addictions over the years. And then he has this conversion to Christianity, you say, shortly after these allegations come out. Yes, absolutely right. So he does. He is baptized. I mean, he didn't get baptized anywhere. He didn't get baptized in a church or, I don't know, quietly.

16:14He got baptized in the River Thames.

16:25Katie, at the outset here, Tristan had outlined the charges that Russell Brand is facing there in the UK. Three counts of rape, three counts of sexual assault. and one of indecent assault. And we then see Russell Brand turn up in court in February of this year to enter his plea of not guilty. How are you feeling, Mr. Brand? Blessed. All right, mate. He was carrying a Bible. And I want to ask you more about this latest incarnation, if you can call it that, of Russell Brand's, and that is his conversion to Christianity. Because not only did he have that baptism, he has now written a book called How to Be a Christian in Seven Days.

17:05It's the first book that's being put out, I believe, by Tucker Carlson, conservative commentator here in the U.S. He has an imprint now and he's a very popular podcaster as well. Why do you see Tucker Carlson and Russell Brand teaming up? Well, it's interesting, isn't it? If you think about Tucker Carlson and some of those other high profile YouTubers in America doing those interview shows that Tucker Carlson does, I mean, their whole USP is they want to speak to anyone without fear or favour. Did you become a Christian in the 70s? No, I became a Christian both instantaneously, but over the entirety of my life.

17:43He's also a businessman trying to make a business and he's working with Russell Brand and knows that doing an interview with him around this book is going to publicise the book, is going to therefore publicise this imprint that he's just launched. I heard it as a voice. You just described how you hear these voices. You've spent your whole life worshipping fame and sex. Well, now look, fame and sex have come together. Is this what you wanted? I'm not here to judge anything around Russell Brand's conversion to Christianity, whether it's in good faith or not. That's not for me to judge. People are allowed to make mistakes and feel that they want redemption.

18:21And that is presumably what he says he's doing. Tucker Carlson is a Christian and is giving him a platform to publicize that and talk about what's happened in his life. I did participate in elevating false gods. I did allow sex to become a kind of idol, fame to become an idol. And in the past few weeks, we've seen Russell Brand appear not just on Tucker Carlson's show, but on a slew of different shows ahead of his book's release. You know, Tucker Carlson, you mentioned Piers Morgan, Megyn Kelly. I'm wondering what you noticed at all about some of the appearances, the ways in which Russell spoke, what he spoke about and how he appeared.

19:01So these are three, Tucker Carlson, Piers Morgan and Megyn Kelly are all three high profile people making their shows in the independent media. And they are the places that Russell Brand went to give his interviews. Now, I don't know whether if he'd come to the BBC and said, I'd like to do an interview with you, whether we would have done that. It's way above my pay grade. But certainly he was given a profile by these people. they would all argue we held his feet to the fire. But, I mean, did they? This is the first interview done with any Brit, for example, since the allegations. Yeah. I'm grateful to you for doing it.

19:38But you are slightly hypersensitive to anyone challenging you because most of the media you do, you don't really get challenged. I don't mind being challenged and I want to be challenged, actually, and I like being challenged. And, like, I didn't go, what, Piers Morgan? Right. This is what he's like. Yeah. He's going to be stroking my thigh for that interview. If you think about Piers Morgan, I mean, Piers Morgan did, you know, he accused him of being a grifter and they had quite a lot of backwards and forwards. Yeah, there's this clip that had gone viral of him asking him to look for a particular, what was it, his favourite chapter or favourite verse in the Bible?

20:08What was your thinking of taking it into court? And what you were seeing, looking at some passages, what were the relevant passages for you? All right. Thank you for asking me. Thank you. That didn't hurt, did it? A little bit.

20:24It was this from Isaiah And then, yes, that was incredibly memorable and went everywhere because he spent more than two minutes, Russell Brand, flicking through this Bible Excuse me Going backwards and forwards to try and find this passage in Isaiah that he said he'd been looking at in the court appearance

20:45I've spoken to some people who say that's just what he's like, that's performance art He did that deliberately He didn't look to me like he did that deliberately. But equally, it's interesting that he was so relaxed about it. He didn't get tense. One of the other viral moments on this tour he's done of US shows was on Megyn Kelly's show, where he said that he had sex as a 30-year-old with a 16-year-old girl. And I should say that in the UK, the legal age of consent is 16, not 18. So that would be legal in the UK. What else did he say about that? Well, so what he said, he called himself an immature 30-year-old, and he said he was a different person back then.

21:27Consensual sex, actually, with a variety of people, when there is a strong power differential, as there is when you're a famous man that has the ability to attract women that I had at that time, I think involves exploitation. I think it is exploitative. I recognised that my sexual conduct in the past was selfish and I did not apply enough consideration, barely any I suppose really, to how that sex was affecting other people. I'm interested to ask you, Asma, when you watch these videos of him, you know, in interviews with prominent US presenters, how does he come across, would you say, to an American.

22:13I mean, he has a very stylized, particular way of speaking. How does that appear when you're sitting in the United States? I mean, if you look at him in conversation with someone like Tucker Carlson, it's not an accountability interview. It's two men who seem to have a kinship, just having a conversation about common things, you know, in this case, Christianity. And you'll see in other interviews, he wears a large cross necklace. So some of this, I think, is really interesting that in the American public, faith is a big part of our conversation. To be publicly Christian, I think, is really different than how it would perhaps resonate there in the U.K.

22:54And so he is certainly leaning into that in some of the interviews he's been doing with American podcasters. And does that go down well? There's a segment of the population that I think for whom that would really resonate. And I do think it's worth pointing out that, you know, Russell Brand's now moved to Florida. And so there's certainly a part of American society for whom this message resonates. And you see him having quite a kinship when he's on some of these American podcast platforms. Yeah, absolutely. And not just chat, talk and talk and talk. I don't think Russell Brant suffers from self-doubt.

23:28And he definitely doesn't suffer from worrying that his opinions don't need to be aired or shouldn't be aired. And, you know, there are certainly those who will see his new book, How to Become a Christian Seven Days, they will see his embrace of Christianity as just the latest development for a man who has become very comfortable at rebranding himself over the years and changing where the public winds go. We've certainly seen lots of iterations of Russell Brand, lots of versions of him. So stand up comedian turned actor, morphing into a sort of wronged person as he sees it, anti-establishment, anti-media, now being brought down by the legacy, the mainstream media as he sees it.

24:09I can't remember which interview he did, but he talks about I'm deeply fascinated with the truth. I feel like I've been on trial all my life. My whole life's a trial and it's not culminating because there will be a life after it, whether it's in jail or not. But in that trial, in the hardest times, I've found him. The thread throughout is a need to be noticed and he's not unique in that. I mean, show business, the media is full of people like that. And I suppose also being a contrarian and a chest bearer, if you like, of opinions. But actually also now literally, you know, he's often bare chested.