It’s been more than 10 years since the world watched Katy Perry perform mere minutes after learning about the breakdown of her marriage to Russell Brand in her 2012 Part of Me documentary. Now, the Forgetting Sarah Marshall star is reflecting on their marriage in a new episode of Running Wild With Bear Grylls: The Challenge.
“Aside from my sort of feelings of affection for Katy, it’s a time that I remember as being a little bit chaotic and a bit for me, speaking for myself, a little disconnected,” Brand said. “That was when I was sort of most in the public eye and working in America… some aspects of [that time] were amazing.”
Perry and Brand married in 2010 and divorced 14 months later. The two seismic life events came in the midst of the most commercially dominant phase of Perry’s career. In 2010, she released Teenage Dream, her Grammy-nominated sophomore studio album, which spawned five Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 singles: “Firework,” “California Gurls” (with Snoop Dogg), “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),” “E.T.” (with Kanye West) and the title track. In 2012, the same year their divorce was finalized, Perry re-released the album as Teenage Dream: The Complete Confection, earning an additional Hot 100 chart-topper with “Part of Me.”
“She’s an amazing person,” Brand told Grylls of the pop star. “It was kind of incredible to live for a moment in that eye-of-the-cyclone type aspect of fame.”
Last year, Brand starred in a trio of films, including Death on the Nile, Catherine Called Birdy and Minions: The Rise of Gru, which was the fifth-highest-grossing film of 2022. Perry recently announced the end of her Play Las Vegas residency, as well as plans for new music after taking some time to raise her 3-year-old daughter Daisy Dove Bloom.
