Picture: Russell Brand leaving Trousdale nightclub in West Hollywood Los Angeles, California - 07.05.10
Russell Brand has described his short-lived British comedy show RE:BRAND as a "cry for help" - insisting he suffered a "mental breakdown" while filming the series at the height of his drug addiction.
The funnyman began his career as a video-jockey (VJ) on music channel MTV but he was fired in 2001 after a series of controversial stunts and one notorious incident when he came to work dressed as terror chief Osama bin Laden following the 9/11 attacks.
He went on to star in his own TV show called RE:Brand, which featured a series of shocking pranks including taking a bath with a homeless man and masturbating a gay man in a bathroom.
Brand insists he spent the entire shoot in a drug-addled haze and can't believe he was allowed to continue working.
He tells Playboy magazine, "That entire show was probably a cry for help. I was a junkie when that show was on the air. Within two or three months of it ending, I was in rehab. That was the last dice throw of a desperate man. It was less a cry for help than a mental breakdown on film.
"Jackass was a popular TV show at the time, and I was trying to do a psychological version of Jackass. When I watch it now, I still can't believe half of what I was doing."
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