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Russell Brand has naught to hide. It’s share of his program, not to observe how he earns his living.

The principal British comedian one-time addict has made a calling of telling stories of his wild times with drugs and women, adopting a rock star role in his standup tours and major hosting appearances even as he privately recovered from a hard childhood and twenties lived on the edge.

Talking to Details Magazine, he discusses his ongoing recovery from heroin and alcohol addiction, as good as the calming influence of his wedding to Katy Perry.

Eight years sober, Brand plays a recovering eccentric billionaire in the remaking of the Dudley Moore classic “Arthur,” scheduled for an April release. It’s not a role far from home; in his native Britain, he became known for his wild stage shows and two memoirs. He said outrageous things in face of outside audiences – his diss of the Jonas Brothers and, more pointedly, George W. Bush at the 2008 VMAs come to head in America, though they’re only the tip of the iceberg – and did outrageous things.

Outrageous things that include sticking a Barbie in his rectum, about which he said, “If I remember correctly, I chose the Barbie doll because it represents the oppressiveness of women, the stereotype of femininity, the commercialisation of sexuality, blah blah blah.”

But it was all an act, he tells the magazine, even if he didn’t quite know it at the time.

Now, in recovery, he attends AA meetings three times a week and adheres to a rigorous program; to go off the program, he insists, is to invite slowly creeping death, first as a fog and then wearily draining into lifelessness, back into his world.

“To me, the solemnity is heroin, and so death. You know, to sleep,” he said, “that incremental suicide of turning your spirit into a dream, to have being awake as like to rest as possible. Drowsily, lazily, dry-mouth your way through the day’s ceremonies, fumble your way back into the dew-bather you never actually left, draped in brown, brown now all around, the haze!”