EXCLUSIVE: Drug & Sex Addict Russell Brand's Secret Vice: Dead Animals

March 14 2011, Published 12:58 p.m. ET
Russell Brand is a self confessed past drug addict, alcoholic and womanizer -- but who knew about his other, secret obsession -- dead animals?
Famed rock ‘n’ roll author Neil Strauss spoke exclusively to Breaking Celebrity News and shared some of the gruesome details from a very candid interview he conducted with the comic, a snippet of which is included in Strauss’ upcoming book Everyone Loves You When You Are Dead.
“I was fixated with dead animals and death,” Brand admitted to Strauss.
“The driving ideology behind what I was doing was pretty safe, right? And I felt that people were spellbound, like they’d been hypnotized, and I had to wake them up. So I would do things to wake them up. Like I’d have a load of dead rats or dead chicks, like baby birds, on stage.
“And I’d smash them up with a hammer and then throw them into the audience and go, ‘Why are you disgusted? I’ve just rearranged their atoms. They’re dead already. Nothing’s happened. You’re being shocked by nothing.’”
“He was clearly on drugs when he smashed the animals on stage,” Strauss told Breaking Celebrity News about his take on Brand’s bizarre behavior. “Also, the whole show was about shock value, because at the time he was hungry for attention because he had just started out.
“He thought this was art, it was important to him - this was him trying to be a rockstar, trying to make a point about what is really right from wrong since the animals were dead before he ‘killed’ them. Funnily enough, since then PETA has embraced him and called him the sexiest vegetarian.”
In his interview Brand also admits that several years ago, while he was behaving so wildly, he was facing a very trying time in his life.
“I was addicted to crack and heroin at that time and was...I’ve always had some destructive tendencies and I was unstable. I had no off switch. I was unable to manage it. Up until then I’d never had money in my life and as soon as people gave me money, I just hit the f**k it button and blew up.”