Dirty Sexy Funny

What's one of the better stories you told them?
When I was making RE: BRAND, a TV show that was inspired by Jackass, I was doing all these insane things, like having a bath with a homeless man whose ulcerated legs were weeping into the water. And I smoked crack with a prostitute and her family. During that time, we were on tour in this Winnebago, and I drank a bottle of gin first thing in the morning to steady my nerves. It made me incredibly emotional, and I was crying. I climbed on top of the Winnebago. I said, "Film me!" And the film crew said, "We can't film you on a moving vehicle, it's against regulations!" So I said, "You make me sick!" and stuck my fingers down my throat and started puking, but there was nothing to come out except fumes. So I tried to vomit fumes on the production company as a punishment for not having trust. Then this whole shoot was canceled, and several of my friends lost their jobs. My solution was to say, "Let's just not tell our mums."

You've got your second appearance as Aldous Snow coming up, in the "Sarah Marshall" sequel.
Yes, in the film, Get Him to the Greek, Aldous Snow is now back on drugs, and Jonah Hill's character is charged with getting him from London to the Greek Theater in Los Angeles. Hilarity ensues. I torture him.

Do you like being the awful Aldous Snow better than being the clean one?
Well, I can use my friendships with British rock stars more successfully. Noel Gallagher will be a much better resource.

You're also in an Adam Sandler movie in December called "Bedtime Stories." Wasn't Sandler someone who encouraged you to come to America?
Yes. He came on my show, on my MTV show — MTV re-employed me a couple of years after the September 12th incident because I got clean, and I had my own chat show there. We had Tom Cruise, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Christina Aguilera, Busta Rhymes. All manner of amazing people came on it. And when Adam came on it, he said, "Just come to America and do films."

How'd your interview with Tom Cruise go?
He was one of the most alarmingly courteous people I've ever met. He made a point of coming up to me in a corridor and saying my name before I met him. He knows that he's Tom Cruise, and if he says that, it's going to unsettle you, and it did. "Hello, Russell. I'm Tom." I'm going, "Yes, I'm aware that you're Tom Cruise. I spent the whole day being groomed about the interview."

You've been huge in the U.K. forever, but we're just hearing about you more recently in the U.S. How do you think American audiences are different from British audiences?
When an English journalist asks that question, they want me to go, "American audiences are stupid." But that is not what I've found. I made a documentary about Jack Kerouac a year ago, and traveling across America I met people that look like slack-jawed, gaptoothed hillbillies. I thought, "This'll be a laugh." But when I went to talk to them, they talked about Noam Chomsky, the Federal Reserve, the worthlessness of the dollar — there was unbelievable awareness. A mistake that I will never make is to forget that there is a distinction between American foreign policy and the American people.