Bobby Brown promoted BET’s “The Bobby Brown Story” at a place with a difficult history for him: The Beverly Hilton, the hotel where his ex-wife Whitney Houston died in 2012.
“The spirit of my ex-wife is probably still here,” Brown said, when asked how it felt to be in the hotel. “It just feels good to be here and to promote this movie.”
As Brown noted, he did not choose the location. The panel was part of an annual summer gathering by the Television Critics Association, which is almost always held at the hotel.
The miniseries is a continuation of BET’s “The New Edition Story” miniseries, which will chronicle Brown’s exit from the group, his solo career, and his tabloid-fodder marriage to Houston. Brown is hoping the miniseries will set the record straight on what the press has reported about him through all the years.
“What people don’t understand is that the stories that have been told about me are untrue,” he claimed. “We’re just correcting everything that the press has believed about me.”
However, there was a tense moment at the end of the panel when Brown denied, despite evidence to the contrary, that Houston ever called 911 on him during their marriage.
Earlier in the panel, he spoke more broadly about his chaotic marriage with Houston. “What me and Whitney went through was what we went through.” He argued that the biggest misconception of him is that he’s a bad person: “I think the bad boy image came from me on stage, not being a human being.”
Executive producer Jesse Collins said the miniseries will hopefully shine a new light on Brown’s life: “There definitely was a narrative of who he was as a person,” he said. “Bobby never really was given the opportunity to explain his side of the story.”
Woody McClain, who portrays Brown in the miniseries, said that he didn’t really know who Brown was beyond news stories. Having Brown so invovled with the project, he said, gave him a different viewpoint.
“It changed my perception of who he is,” McClain said.
The film includes Bobbi Kristina Brown, Brown’s daughter with Houston, who died at the age of 22 in 2015.
“The hardest parts were scenes with my daughter,” Brown said. “I wasn’t able to sit through the visual part of them filming that.”