Russell Brand was scheduled to make an appearance at the film portion of the South By SouthWest festival. He was supposed to be in attendance for the festival’s opening night documentary film, Brand: A Second Coming, but according to a blog post on his website he will no longer be attending the festival.

The film is about Brand and fame, and looks specifically into the issues surrounding fame that he has encountered in his progression of celebrity. The film took seven years to make and many directors to get it done.

Brand has been quite open about much of his life in the past, but this particular documentary proved to be too much for him to handle. Brand had already made it clear that there would be no interviews at the festival but was supposed to attend a party. Even that was too much, as Brand took to his website RussellBrand.com the day of to discuss his decision to not appear at the festival.

“I apologise sincerely to the organisers of sxsw for my non-attendance,” he began.

His decision to not attend seems to be one of personal discomfort.

“I know Ondi [Timoner, the director of the film] is an artist and I’m told the film is good, but for me watching it was very uncomfortable.”

“You’d think a narcissist would like nothing more than talking about themselves and their rags-to-riches, hard-luck story, but actually, it felt like, to me, my life was hard enough the first time round, and going through it again was painful and sad.”

Brand seemed to be aware of a variety of changes he had undergone throughout the making of the film.

“Over the sprawling time period in which we’d been in production I’d transitioned from an attention-seeking missile, exploding into exhibitionism at every turn, into a man who, whilst still a show-off, was becoming disillusioned and disconnected from fame, celebrity and all its sticky ephemera,” he said.

Despite Brand’s decision to not appear at the festival, the film will still be opening Friday March 13 at SXSW.