Remember When: Lars Ulrich Played Himself In ‘Get Him to the Greek’

A lot of times rock movies get many aspects of the business wrong, either by heightening certain elements or just fabricating things altogether. Sometimes they get a lot of things right. A spin-off with characters from Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek resides somewhere in the middle, fusing Hollywood fantasy with moments that smack of truth. The 2010 comedy film stars Russell Brand as faded rock star Aldous Snow and Jonah Hill as Aaron Green, a talent scout for Pinnacle Records. He comes up with the idea of a 10th anniversary concert of Snow’s famous live album at The Greek Theatre. To make this possible career-reviving move happen, Green is tasked by his narcissistic, abusive label chief (Sean Combs) with coordinating it and getting Snow there to do the show.

Let There Be Lars

Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich shows up twice in the movie playing himself. After Snow and his pop star girlfriend Jackie Q (Rose Byrne) break up, she invites Ulrich onto her next project and into her bed. Snow calls up Jackie early in the morning because he wants to see her, and even though she tells Lars it’s her mom calling, he knows who it is and grabs the phone.

“Oy, Aldous, it’s Lars,” Ulrich declares.

Snow proceeds to pretend he’s Jackie’s mom and puts on a fake voice: “I’m ashamed that you’re with a drummer, Jackie. I so dreamed that you would marry a frontman with charisma, razzamatazz. Rough around the edges but stars in his eyes, you know.”

“Jackie,” Ulrich turns to her, “your mom kind of sounds like a Monty Python skit.”

Later on, Snow meets with Jackie and confirms they are over as a couple after seven years, and she also reveals a secret about their son Naples. She gushes about how much more intimate and sensitive her relationship with the drummer is, especially when he cried for three hours in front of her. Snow remains unimpressed.

As Snow and Jackie are saying goodbye, Ulrich walks in. “Aldous.”

“Oh hello, Enter Sandman,” Snow replies in a low voice.

Ulrich says to Jackie, “Babe, we should really get back to Naples, he’s back there waiting for us.”

Snow raises his voice and shouts, “Oh, why don’t you go sue Napster, you little Danish tw-t!”

Diss and Diss Alike

The best part of these cameos is they were unexpected, and it was fun to watch Brand and Ulrich mock diss each other.

In an interview with Artisan News Service, Ulrich recalled, “It was so much fun. I mean, they sent the script and I learned my lines. And when I showed up on the set, none of it mattered—they just took the script and threw it away. We were just improvising and having fun and insulting each other, and it was a great time. Russell, obviously, is a stand-up comedian, first and foremost, or at least he started as a stand-up comedian, so it’s all just improvising.”

Regarding whether he lent any real-life rock-star pointers to the Get Him to the Greek filmmakers, Ulrich said, “They kept asking me if I could give them pointers about what it’s really like, and I tried to tell them, but in my world, most of what goes on in this world is so difficult to actually make anybody believe that it actually happened, so I think most of it just went over their heads.”

The Napster joke is particularly funny because, despite all the grief Ulrich got for coming down on the controversial streamer, he was right about them stealing revenue from recording artists great and small. (Say it with us: “Lars was right.”)

Sour Footnote

It’s too bad that Get Him to the Greek is now retroactively sullied because of the troubling sex-trafficking allegations against co-star Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. The irony of his presence in the film is it doesn’t seem like he needed a script to portray a controlling, self-centered industry chief. It was perfect typecasting, and one wonders if his parts were improvised too. They do reflect real-life quite well in this rock fantasy.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Photo by Alex Berliner/BEI/Shutterstock