When I phone Derren Brown, I’ve just watched him persuade someone that they’ve witnessed a zombie apocalypse. Derren’s shows have convinced people to rob banks and attempt the assassination of Stephen Fry.
I assume our conversation will be full of subliminal attempts to warp my brain, and so I am somewhat apprehensive, scared even at the start of our interview. Yet Derren Brown is more restrained than sinister – if he wasn’t renowned for manipulating minds, I’d assume he was an accountant.
Derren is adamant that he doesn’t constantly hypnotise interviewers. I ask whether he’s tempted to use his skills off-stage. “For evil?” he laughs. “Maybe, not anymore. I feel like I’ve grown out of that. When I was young, I was always having to do magic tricks to impress people, because I didn’t really know how to have a normal conversation…it was sort of a bit pathetic.”
Derren projects none of the showmanship of his performances. His relationship with magic began due to social insecurity, not the desire to perform grandiose television stunts. Magic is “quite a childish urge.” He believes confidence is rare among magicians. “It’s the quickest route to impressing people, if you don’t feel very impressive, definitely. A lot of kids, maybe who aren’t very self-confident, tend to go through a magic phase and you tend to grow out of it… I would have definitely stopped it by now; it was only because I could find a way with the TV, that I could make it something a bit more grown up, that kept it going.”
Derren’s childhood desire for validation has been superseded by an interest in how his skills affect other people. “Otherwise you just get sick of magicians, you find them cool for a couple of years and then you sense that they’re just posturing – that it’s all a bit silly. They go out of favour.” Nowadays, he sees his work in more professional terms; he isn’t a mind reader off stage. “I don’t think of it or play up to it, but I’ve got a friend who said that when he first knew me, he was convinced I was just doing stuff all the time and everything I said was some calculated piece of influence, which wasn’t the case at all.”
Derren got into magic while studying Law and German at Bristol University, when his two main characteristics were kleptomania and evangelical Christianity. He is now famous for his blend of pop-psychology and magic. After his show Mind Control in 2000, he became known for playing Russian roulette and predicting lottery numbers live on air. His recent shows are more documentary, often assessing the psychological basis of religion. In 2012, he converted an atheist to Christianity in fifteen minutes.
Having lost faith in his twenties, Derren is ambivalent towards religion. He once described The God Delusion as his “favourite book”, but now he’s more reserved. “I was a Christian for many years, and now I’m not; I am very aware that people spend a lot of time thinking about how it is that we end up believing in things… People spend their lives debunking that, and whilst I share their views, that can be fairly joyless. There are ways of getting that message out without it seeming belligerent.”
In one recent show, Fear and Faith, Derren emphasised his respect for individuals’ faiths. Investigating the placebo effect, he said religion “doesn’t have to be foolish”, and beliefs “are clearly very real to the people who hold them.” Today he seems warier. He differentiates between private belief, and “the nasty end of the wedge. What faith in things, as opposed to thought, can lead to. Once you get into the faith that your idea is the correct idea, there’s a clear logical pathway to intolerance and a feeling of invincibility… Once you believe that you’re a martyr, and you’re prepared to sacrifice yourself for it, you’ve created this perfect system that doesn’t feel like it can go anywhere good.”
He compares religious belief with psychics. “I think a lot of it’s very ugly and that intellectual bravery is important…but there will people who’ll go to psychics and take great comfort in it, and not get addicted to it, and maybe don’t really believe it’s true… It would be odd to say that’s wrong and needs to be taken away from them. There are plenty of grey areas.”
Derren’s relationship with the supernatural is more complex than most ‘mind-readers’. I question why he never professed to be psychic. “There are plenty of people who do that, who have come from the world of showbiz and do it knowingly, seeing it sells well. But you’ve got to live with that. That’s your life. And I remember early on in my career thinking, what do people like Uri Geller tell their kids?… It’s a difficult line to tread between being honest enough but also being entertaining and maintaining some mystery.”
In recent years, Derren has emphasised the reasoning behind his beliefs. With the exception of Apocalypse, in which he convinced someone that Britain had been wiped off the map in a meteor strike, he’s dropped most of the grandeur of his early career. He tells me that Infamous, his new stage show, is “a bit more stripped down than previous shows”.
Happy to deflate the mystery of his performances, he jokes about on-stage disasters. “There was one guy in Belfast a few years ago who got up on stage and he just started throwing up, full on projectile vomiting over me, the other participants over the stage, and all over the front row. It just didn’t stop; he had to be sent back down and he was throwing up all over the ushers. You have to make that decision – is it okay to carry on?”
His self-deprecation distinguishes Derren from other psychics. He thinks we’re all familiar with his methods. “It works in the same way that, if you break up with somebody – and as you’re feeling terrible – there’s a song on the radio, years later, whenever you hear that song, you’ll feel terrible. We’ve all experienced that sort of thing… It’s perfectly ordinary processes I’m using; I’m just putting them into practice in a slightly different way.”
He shies away from the vocabulary of traditional magicians. Hypnosis is “a slightly misleading idea”, based on suggestibility. “We’re suggestible in some situations and not in others. If we’re trying to achieve something that we want for ourselves, if we’re going to see a hypnotherapist to give up smoking – that’s very different to some guy on stage who’s trying to make you dance around and think you’re a ballerina. It all depends on context.”
When I wonder about the use of these techniques in advertising, he’s surprised at my naivety. “Oh yeah, that’s what the business is! It’s not necessarily sinister…Politicians use it, speech writers know about it… We’re all cynical about it, we all sniff at adverts for KFC or whatever. Which is fine until we’re starving hungry out in the high street and faced with KFC or another company we’ve never heard of, and we all go for KFC. We’re all susceptible to it at some level.”
Derren’s reasoned approach makes you feel educated about irrationality, not misled by cheap illusions. Sometimes his techniques seem inhumane: shock-entertainment cloaked by a veneer of science. Yet his motivation by rationalism is genuine. At the end of the interview, I say “break a leg” for his stage show that night. “No, no, ‘good luck’ is fine,” he says. “I’m not superstitious.”
Derren Brown is performing his new show, Infamous, at The New Theatre on 22nd-27th April
