FRAUGHT

“Jimmy was unfazed when confronted with the middle-aged version of the suicidal teenager. Firstly he is not emotionally involved. The care, or even love, he feels for me is not going to capsize his objectivity, he is a father figure, not a father. A father can be, as we all fucking know (!), a more fraught and conflicted role. Being an appropriate mentor, somewhat delivered by serendipity – all my mentors have floated into my life, like celestial beings – Jimmy knew what to say. He had been in this position himself. It is normal, necessary, beneficial to, at the midpoint in the journey, question the direction of travel. The relationship was but one aspect of my life that needed to change, it was the most vivid and obvious but it was merely the emissary for all necessary change. I had been living in an illusion and the illusion was fading. I was awakening from the dream of my previous self and if the somnambulance was roughly disrupted I would not withstand the shock.

I will always remember the tone with which Jimmy spoke if not all of the content. He normalized my feelings, he contextualized them, he told me they would pass and that this was part of my metamorphosis. Crucially there was an authenticity to his words that meant I trusted him more than my own feelings. He always demonstrates these qualities. When I make the pilgrimage to his Camden office and patiently wait while he wraps up a meeting or a call, I sit on the leather sofa, self-conscious and reverential, focused on the picture of Duvall and Brando in The Godfather that is above the sofa opposite, above where he will sit.”

“If you work in entertainment you will be aware of the galling cliché of the actor who chums up to the crew with the unspoken, ‘Yeah, I guess I’m just more at home with the horny-handed sons of the soil than with other pampered thesps’ subtext; ‘I guess it’s because I’m a muthafuckin gangsta’. Well, I’m one of them. You should see me chatting football with me homies, eschewing the pleasures of the officers’ mess to get down and dirty in the trenches. Comedy will always be my religion because so few things are just one thing and so many things are everything at once. This state of proletariat solidarity is both a cringey pose and entirely sincere. It is both a managed effort and completely who I am. I both entirely reject my childhood in Grays, Essex, and the fraught awfulness of my interactions with my shift-worker stepdad, not even – actually just my mum’s live-in boyfriend – and entirely accept that I am, marrow deep, made there. I come from there, there where I never belonged.”

Excerpt From

Mentors

Russell Brand