Russell Brand’s Parental Payback

British actor Russell Brand took his mother to the Oscars this year as payback for the way she stood by him during the dark days of his drug addictions. "I was a broken person and I had broken my family,” Brand told the UK Sun. “I felt lonely. So being able to take her to the Oscars--a bit of payback for the stuff she went through when I was a kid--was good." In sharp contrast to America’s reigning bad-boy Charlie Sheen, whose sobriety program includes tiger blood, Adonis DNA, and the sheer willpower of the Sheen brain, Britain’s most famous recovering addict at the moment is without question Russell Brand, known for his outrageous behavior on stage and off. But there is one important difference: Brand is keen on letting the world know that recovery is not easy. Clean and sober now for eight years, he admits that without attending Alcoholic Anonymous meetings three times a week and staying busy (he has two new movies opening this month, the animated “Hop” and a reboot of the Dudley Moore classic “Arthur”), it would be easy to fall back into the clutches of addiction. In a recent interview with Details Magazine, Brand explains: “The only way to cope is with a program. If you stop doing the recovery, even eating too much chocolate, something will flare up, and I know where that leads …”