READ MORE: An extended Q&A with the actor turned (imminent) revolutionary.

Last year, the comedian Russell Brand declared on national television in his native Great Britain that he has never voted and doesn’t believe in voting. “It’s not that I’m not voting out of apathy,” he told his inquisitor, Jeremy Paxman of the BBC Two program Newsnight. “I’m not voting,” he said, his voice rising, his balled-up hands suddenly punching the air in time with his words, “out of absolute indifference and weariness and exhaustion from the lies, treachery, deceit of the political class that has been going on for generations now, and which has now reached fever pitch where you have a disenfranchised, disillusioned, despondent underclass that are not being represented by that political system. So voting for it is tacit complicity with that system.”

Paxman, a tall, imposing man with Easter Island features and a Mike Wallace flair for tightening the clamps on his subjects, wasn’t about to let Brand off the hook. “Well, why don’t you change it, then?” he asked. “Why don’t you start by voting?”

Back and forth they went, with Brand calling for the dismantling of the current political system and Paxman chiding his guest for offering no specifics of his proposed revolution—a deliriously charged scene out of a Paddy Chayefsky teleplay. Near the end, Brand appealed to Paxman to join his side. “Aren’t you bored?” he asked his interviewer. “Aren’t you more bored than anyone? Ain’t you been talking to them year after year, listening to their lies, their nonsense? Then it’s ‘This one gets in,’ then it’s ‘That one getting in,’ but the problem continues? Why are we going to continue to contribute to this façade?”

The two men’s exchange was a sensation upon its airing and remains one; on YouTube, the BBC’s upload of this interview is at 10 million views and counting. The face-off cemented Brand’s profile as a legit political thinker, an eloquent voice of the dispossessed, a man worth taking seriously, a— vzzhhhww!

This is where the needle-scratch sound effect comes in; where, if I were narrating this story aloud, we’d pause abruptly to acknowledge your thoughts of “Wait, what?” For if you’re not caught up on Russell Brand, you probably think of him as I used to, as the frizz-haired, guyliner’d popinjay in Criss Angel hand-me-downs who hosted MTV’s Video Music Awards a couple of times last decade, acquitted himself decently as an oversexed rock star in Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek, had one of those short-shelf-life Hollywood marriages (to Katy Perry in his case) that was more about callow impetuosity than love, and then mercifully drifted off our radar, a minor pop-culture irritant who had had his day.

I was among the not-caught-up until about six months before the Paxman interview, which took place in October of 2013. In April of the same year, Margaret Thatcher died, and Brand wrote an assessment of her for The Guardian that was notable both for its virtuosic facility with the English language (“Her voice, a bellicose yawn, somehow both boring and boring—I could ignore the content but the intent drilled its way in”) and for a conspicuous absence of gloating, ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead meanness. “If you opposed Thatcher’s ideas,” he wrote, “it was likely because of their lack of compassion, which is really just a word for love. If love is something you cherish, it is hard to glean much joy from death, even in one’s enemies.”

Good God, the leather-trousered irritant has depth and grace! He proved equally thoughtful in the same newspaper on the deaths of Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robin Williams, both of which struck a personal chord, given Brand’s own status as a recovering drug addict. (He sympathetically likened Williams to “a fallen bird on a hard floor.”) What to make of this rebranded Brand? Since February, he has been presenting this transformed version of himself—more socially and politically engaged, less visually assaultive (his long hair thankfully no longer teased skyward)—through a Webisode series on his YouTube channel called The Trews, a portmanteau of “the truth” and “the news.” It’s a sort of lo-fi, on-the-fly Daily Show, his own vehicle for examining the issues du jour, be they ISIS, global warming, or Scottish independence. Now comes Brand’s latest book, Revolution (Ballantine Books), which was conceived in direct response to the Paxman episode, as an attempt to stitch together a vision of what his status-quo-busting Utopia might look like.

It is not a conventional political treatise, not least because it was written by Russell Brand. “Just to reiterate the irrelevance of bi-party democracy,” he writes at one point, “we all get excited by the Blairs, Obamas, and Clintons, with their well-rehearsed gestures and photo-op affability, but when push comes to shove, we’re dealing with cunts.” Still, Revolution, with its shout-outs to Noam Chomsky and the anti-globalization writer-activists Naomi Klein and Helena Norberg-Hodge, isn’t the sort of rollicking P.O.V. fun-ride through the alleyways of debauchery that made his first two books—My Booky Wook (about his troubled childhood and struggles with addiction) and Booky Wook 2 (about his sexually decadent newly famous phase)—best-sellers and catnip to younger readers. Will his old following continue with him down this new path?

This, I discovered when I met with the 39-year-old Brand in London earlier this autumn, is the least of his concerns. Conventional showbiz ambition seems to be another of the things he has gotten out of his system, like heroin, crack, and groupies. “I have decided that I don’t need to make any money anymore,” he told me. He made clear that this does not mean he will stop doing stand-up comedy and accepting paychecks, but, rather, that he will channel his income into projects that hew to his ideals. “The money that I get,” he said, “I’m going to use for the establishment of community centers, which will sell good food and provide a place for people to hang out: initially, a service for people recovering from drug addiction, but also an incubator for social enterprises, where people will work, on a not-for-profit basis, in a wide variety of trades.”

He admitted that, given his chronic egotism, this will all take some adjusting to, and that there are still times when he thinks, “Yes! There will be a new socialist state, and I will be this glamorous fusion of Christ and Che Guevara.” But, he insisted, he’s learned to catch himself. “I don’t think we’re in a situation that requires the narrative of the heroic individual, striding to the front with particularly nice hair,” he said.

Brand has a disarming, bouncy levity that makes his earnestness go down more easily than it otherwise might. He is fond of quoting John Cleese’s maxim that too many people confuse seriousness with solemnity, and he appears determined never to come off as solemn, no matter how serious the point he is making.

He is also possessed of an innate carnality that, though it served more base purposes in his lady-killer days, he now deploys to establish emotional connections rather than genital ones. The actor Stephen Fry told me before I met with Brand that “Russell has an extraordinary ability when it comes to gazing directly into the eyes.” He meant this as a compliment, noting Brand’s gift for getting through to hardcase drug users who have not yet found sobriety. (Fry, too, is a recovering addict.) Even in less fraught situations, Brand is quite something to experience in person. Throughout our conversation, in a snug banquette in a nice restaurant, there was intense retinal lock-in worthy of a hypnotist, plus lots of hand-on-arm touching for emphasis and a wriggly, writhing restlessness, his body in one moment recumbently draped across the banquette, legs splayed apart, and, in the next moment, tilted intently forward, his chin nearly to mine.

This physicality is not contrived, but Brand is aware of its effect on people and his knack for being a disruptive presence. Certainly Mika Brzezinski can attest to this. In June of last year, in what became Brand’s other big viral-video moment of 2013, he appeared as a guest on Brzezinski’s MSNBC program, Morning Joe, to promote his then current stand-up tour, “The Messiah Complex.” Unfamiliar with Brand and insufficiently briefed on him, she was palpably a-quaver with nervous energy almost from the moment he began swiveling in his swivel chair, and she soon referred to Brand in the third person to her panelists, Brian Shactman and Katty Kay: “It’s not listening to him—it’s just sort of taking it all in. I’m transfixed,” she said. Brand, his smile not quite concealing his indignation, responded, “You are talking about me as if I’m not here and as if I’m an extraterrestrial!”

From there, the scene unraveled in a fashion seldom witnessed on news television, yet marvelous for that very reason. Kay, in the chaos, inadvertently began calling Brand “Willy Brandt,” the name of a former chancellor of West Germany. Shactman, who had also spoken of Brand in the third person, made a joke about losing his tie and mimicking Brand’s unbuttoned-to-the-sternum look. As for Brzezinski, she shrank into a hunched, cowering pose, a look of bewilderment on her face. (She declined to be interviewed for this article.) “This is what you all do for a living?,” Brand asked in exasperation. He proceeded to hijack the broadcast, speaking directly into the camera for a couple of minutes, improvising his own news report.

Brand(t) told me that he had no intention of making an event of his Morning Joe appearance, and had shown up merely wanting to plug his tour. “It’s just I couldn’t believe how impolite they were, and also, I sensed they were being impolite from a condescending perspective, like they thought they was better than me. I was astonished,” he said.

In retrospect, however, he is glad for the opportunity the moment gave him to “expose television”—for, in his opinion, the mainstream news organizations are part of the problem, serving the same narrow audience of moneyed elites as the political leaders with whom he is dissatisfied.

He and Jeremy Paxman, though, have since last year formed an unlikely mutual-admiration society, the latter having gone on record as saying he shares Brand’s disenchantment with Britain’s current political class, if not embracing Brand’s proposed methodologies for fixing the problem. “I’m not willing to shitbag him. I think he adds to the gaiety of nations,” Paxman wrote to me in an e-mail. The two are in discussions about possibly working together on a political road show tied to the 2015 parliamentary elections, wherein they would double-team candidates in interviews—“like a cop movie,” Brand said, “where he’s Danny Glover and I’m Mel Gibson, but without the anti-Semitism.”

Revolution is a strange, unruly book. Mostly, it’s a vision of a post-capitalist society as articulated by the Occupy movement, with a return to decentralized, self-governing communities, the cancellation of consumer debt, the abolition of hierarchical honorifics (e.g., “Doctor,” “Senator,” “Milord”), and the encouragement of hyperlocal, ecologically sustainable agriculture. An avid practitioner of meditation and yoga, Brand also advocates for all individuals to incorporate some form of spiritual practice into their lives.

Brand is careful throughout to leaven the proceedings with light commentary—when he joins an autonomous, decentralized syndicate, he writes, “Suffice it to say, I won’t be joining a syndicate that collectivizes Dior boots”—as a hedge against both the solemnity he so dreads and being boxed into untenable hard-line positions.

“I know that by writing this book I’m burning a lot of bridges,” he told me. “But I can’t accept the imposition of external regulations like ‘Well, give away all your money, then.’ ”

To further complicate matters for Brand, he was, until August, in a serious relationship with a wealthy woman: namely, Jemima Khan, the daughter of the late billionaire corporate raider Sir James Goldsmith (and, as it happens, V.F.’s European editor-at-large). Khan is an associate editor of the liberal magazine New Statesman, and it was her recruitment of Brand to guest-edit an issue that precipitated his notorious appearance on Newsnight. Brand and Khan were still a couple when he was writing Revolution, and, in it, he acknowledges the strange position this placed him in. But he concludes, “I’ve had a bit of a look round the aristocracy recently, and they’re not enjoying it; I think they’ll be glad when it’s over.”

The solutions put forth in Revolution are the kinds of ideas that will be reflexively mocked by the right and nodded along to wistfully by the far left with no actual hope for their implementation. Nevertheless, Brand is absolutely convinced that his revolution is around the corner. On this, I went into Paxman mode on him: How, pray tell, Russell? How will it happen?

“I think that when people start to have some hope that their world can be different, then these ideas will seem natural to them—when people understand that it’s not necessary for it to be this way,” he said. “As for the boots on the ground, people on the street: I think that that’s going to look like mass civil disobedience, like any revolution.”

There are dozens of ways in which I find Brand’s approach wrongheaded. I believe in voting, for starters, and wish that he had canvassed thinkers from across the political spectrum rather than only like-minded anarcho-lefties. Yet Brand has tapped into a visceral, widespread yearning for profound change—“You look for it, and it’s everywhere,” he said—and, not a day after we met, Occupy Central launched its mass demonstrations in Hong Kong, while, over at the U.N., the new prime minister of India, Narendra Modi, called for the establishment of an International Yoga Day, declaring, “By changing our lifestyle and creating consciousness, it can help us deal with climate change.”

Brand came by his political disaffection early. He was born in 1975 in Grays, Essex, an unlovely working-class suburb east of London. His father, Ron, left his mother, Barbara, when he was still a baby, and Russell grew up, by his own reckoning, a lonely outcast, though his talent was sufficiently evident for him to be accepted as a teen into not one but two prestigious drama schools—both of which wound up booting him out for drug use and/or misbehavior.

His descent into junkie-crackhead depravity exposed him to an underclass that he believed to be utterly ignored and unserved by the government. His subsequent ascent from addiction to stardom—he entered rehab on December 13, 2002, and has been clean ever since—ushered him into a comfortable, remunerative working and social life. Yet at the beginning of this decade, while married to Katy Perry, making movies, and living in Los Angeles, he said, “I started to feel like ‘Look how bright and vivid this is, and it’s still not it,’ ” he said.

Brand calls this period his “God-awakening time” (though Perry, from whom he requested a divorce in December 2011, after 14 months of marriage, might have another name for it). Yes, rather surprisingly, Brand is a believer, writing in Revolution, “By yielding authority to a benign power, I found a key to transcend previous limitations.” He further discovered, more pertinently to his revolutionary purposes, a higher consciousness that, he believes, would bind us all together if only we opened ourselves up to it.

Brand’s is an unchurched faith, vaguely Buddhist-like in practice. Every morning, he awakens in his home in Hackney, the now gentrified East London borough where his grandparents lived in its shabbier days, and heads to his roof to meditate, swaddling himself in a white blanket. Meditation is followed by prayer. Brand prays daily for five things, he explained to me.

1. Gratitude: “Thank you for not selecting me to be in the hell that is a lot of people’s lives. Thank you for all the amazing people—very traditional stuff.”
2. Courage: “Help me make decisions for the right reasons.”
3. Healing: “That, every interaction I have, people will come away from me feeling better for having dealt with me, not going ‘Fucking hell, you’re a cunt!’ In De Profundis, Oscar Wilde’s letter from Reading Gaol to his former lover and ultimate nemesis, Lord Alfred Douglas, he wrote that perhaps the idea of Christ the Healer was simply: He made you feel better. It makes me cry every time I think about it.”
4. Signs: “I ask for signs. God, communicate with me. Speak to me through signs—through synchronicity and coincidence and symmetry.”
5. To be in alignment with God’s will: “To not live egotistically from my base desires and fears, but to be a projection of higher values.”

There is yoga after the prayer, and then a second round of meditation after the yoga. “It was a great triumph for me,” Brand told me with a grin, “when I realized that I was praying and meditating more than I was having sex.”

Which brings us to a sticking point: for all his talk of prayerfulness and humility, there persists an image of Brand as a bounder and a cad. Does this compromise his credibility with women? I put this question to Suzanne Moore, a liberal, feminist columnist for The Guardian who is, in many respects, politically sympathetic to Brand. “It’s funny. I have a 13-year-old daughter, and she absolutely adores him—he seems designed for young people who are just getting into politics,” she said. “But he still has this history, no matter how much he cloaks his sexism—and I’ll call it sexism—in this new spiritual talk. He plays this double game, being very self-aware of his past misdeeds, but I don’t know how much respect he has or shows to women.”

The most damning blot on Brand’s track record is the incident that has come to be known in Britain as Sachsgate. In 2008, Brand and the television personality Jonathan Ross, horsing around on the BBC Radio 2 program that Brand then hosted, left a series of crude messages on the answering machine of Andrew Sachs, the beloved character actor who had played the bumbling Spanish waiter Manuel on John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers in the 1970s. Brand had dated Sachs’s granddaughter, a singer named Georgina Baillie. While Brand attempted to leave a message for Sachs, Ross shouted out, “He fucked your granddaughter!” There followed three more messages, including one in which Brand improvised a song about “consensual lovely sex” with Baillie.

The relative offensiveness of this broadcast was blown epically out of proportion by the British press and the BBC itself, which suspended Ross and accepted the resignations of Brand and his immediate overseer, a woman named Lesley Douglas; if these same standards were applied to Howard Stern, he would be serving 12,000 concurrent lifetime bans. And Brand has repeatedly apologized for his actions. Still, the incontrovertible truth is that he behaved boorishly toward Baillie and Sachs. Factor in that he joined his father on a sex-tourism jaunt through the Far East when he was 17, frequented prostitutes throughout his 20s, logged time in a Philadelphia sex-addiction clinic (he opens My Booky Wook with a scene set there), and bailed out of a marriage in its early stages, and one could reasonably infer that Brand, as Moore believes, has issues with respecting women.

“As for the misogyny thing, I have lived a life and had a frame of cultural references that make that charge quite legitimate,” Brand said when I raised the subject with him. “But as a person who’s trying to live a decent, spiritual life, misogyny is not part of my current palette of behaviors… In a way, redemption is a great part of my narrative. I’m talking about disavowing previous lives, previous beliefs, previous behaviors.”

I asked Brand if, by the same token, we hold public figures to an absurdly high standard, especially when they take political stands—if we demand a moral purity of such figures that is unrealistic and ultimately irrelevant. I received an answer that was quite unexpected. “No political stance has any value if the person making that stance doesn’t behave decent, so I think it’s a valid point,” he said. “And those women’s suspicions”—meaning women who regard him warily—“they’re entitled to them. I suppose my hope is that, in my ongoing journey, that will seem less and less relevant, and more and more of the past.

“I don’t think puritanism is necessarily a bad thing,” he concluded, “as long as being pure don’t involve drowning witches.”

Like Brand himself, Revolution is somewhat incisive, somewhat ridiculous, and somewhat reckless. Yet Brand’s very incursion into the punditocracy is a little revolution, a bracing slap on a tired, jowly face. And he walks the walk: counseling addicts, advocating on behalf of fire departments facing funding cuts and single mothers facing eviction from public housing. How many aspiring famous people finally reach that island of prosperity and then pull up the drawbridge, lowering it only for the occasional Prius ride to the food-bank benefit?

“Give us a cuddle, then!,” Brand implored as I rose to depart, and there followed an involuntary envelopment in silk, beads, leather, and beard scruff. Such is the curious charisma of the comedian turned radical anarcho-syndicalist puritan recovering-addict dandy revolutionary.

This story is featured in the December issue; for access to the full issue, subscribe now to Vanity Fair’s digital edition, available November 6 for download.