It may be hard to picture the literary heart that beats within comedic actor Russell Brand, (especially if you're checking out his abs, Nancy). His new movie, "Get Him to the Greek," (here's the trailer) opened this week and he again plays the role of spoiled actor Aldous Snow.
The guy's real life has been a mess -- addictions to heroin, sex, you name it -- so he has suffered enough for two or three writers. But somehow, Brand can make fun of his faults in an endearing way, rather than falling into full-blown piggishness. His turn as Snow in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" is a good example, and the theme is carried out in his memoir "My Booky Wook."
Here's an excerpt about his wanderings among "London's Hogarthian underbelly" as he searches for drugs: "It felt like gravity was pulling [Pearl] downwards. You could see this struggle reflected in every movement she made - as if she couldn't blink or turn her head without doing battle with Newton's implacable adversary. There was a picture of Pearl that they had on their wall. A charcoal drawing, I suspect from Leicester Square - not a caricature, a realistic one. The street artist had really captured the tragedy of Pearl as a character, so this thing that was meant to be a memento of a happy trip to the Trocadero was actually a haunting reminder of the family's terminal dilemma."
Clearly, there's some clever writing here, as well as plenty of the kind of "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" that you'd see in Monty Python skits. So maybe Brand, who seems to have been playing a role for his entire life, is more than the sum of his parts. Remember, he once traveled around the U.S. for a series that paid homage to Jack Kerouc's "On the Road." Anybody who reveres that classic can't be all bad.