Russell Brand talked to the folks at Details Magazine about wife Katy Perry, life as a recovering drug and sex addict, and how his character in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Aldous Huxley, was rewritten for him after his audition:

On his marriage to Katy: “at once the most mundane and spectacular thing in the world.”  “There are a lot of areas where I’ve simply relinquished decision-making. It really does make my mates laugh, though.”

On being cast in Forgetting Sarah Marshall: Aldous Snow was initially written as a proper English chap, a writer.  “We were convinced the casting director had played a gag on us,” says director Nicholas Stoller. “The hair, makeup, clothes—I think he had 18 belts on? Jason [Segel, the film’s star and screenwriter] asked Brand about the role, and he said he’d ‘had a cursory glance’—what a thing to say to a director and writer.  Asked about improv, it was as if he’d never heard of that either.  Then he started in.  When he left, Jason got up and did a jig.”  The part was rewritten.

On his tabloid-fueled rocker-sex-god persona: “Well, it seems obvious that to turn myself into a character—incredibly theatrical and rock-and-roll and languid and sexualized—was to emphasize areas where I was confident, to draw the eye from the obvious deficit of a man only just getting over being a junkie.  I’ve very confident in the physical manifestation of a rocker.  And there are aphorisms I still deem tight: the carnal self is the true self.  In that barbaric, marauding period of promiscuity, there was a type of Aleister Crowley ‘Do what thou wilt’ as the sum of the law.  That voice you use when you come?  I was using it to perform.  Not some distant, attic-dwelling emotion brought out occasionally, like a front room you never use except when the vicar visits.  I was in there fucking all the time.”

On coping with addiction: “The only way to cope is with a program.  If you stop doing recovery, even eating too much chocolate, something will flare up, and I know where that leads, because I’ve been there before.  To me, gravity is heroin, and then death.”

Head on over to Details for the entire interview.