MAGIC? It can make you go mad’
He’s turned pensioners into art thieves, and even ‘healed’ the sick... no wonder Derren Brown was worried all that power was going to his head writes Cole Moreton
Derren Brown looks deep into my eyes and smiles. ‘Being a hypnotist is the ultimate fantasy of control, isn’t it?’ I can only agree with this master of manipulation, a grand illusionist with the power to read the minds of strangers and make them do outrageous things, like rob a security van, shoot Stephen Fry or push an innocent victim off a roof.
Those were faked for television specials – The Heist, The Experiment: The Assassin and Pushed To The Edge – but the people involved thought it was all happening for real. We, the viewers, were in on the trick those times, but looked on in alarm when Brown seemed to risk blowing his brains out with a pistol on Russian Roulette – or astonishment when he predicted the right numbers on How To Win The Lottery. So does that sense of power over people explain why Brown does what he does? ‘Big time. The desire to perform was huge, and so was the controlling aspect of it.’
The greatest mentalist magician of our age is making a new special for Netflix and touring Britain with a show called Underground, which celebrates his most successful illusions. Then he’ll go to Broadway and attempt to seduce America.
Audiences are always sworn to secrecy about his shows, and Brown never usually explains the material he performs, but today is going to be different. For once he’ll reveal some of his secrets and talk about a time it all went wrong live on stage. And he’ll describe how one show got way out of hand when people started to experience ‘miracles’ – even though he knew he was faking it. The success went to his head so much that he thought about setting up as a real-life stadium healer. ‘I totally saw how you can start to go mad.’ And the great manipulator will warn that we are having our strings pulled all the time by politicians: ‘The more bewildered we are, the more suggestible we become.’
But what’s most fascinating – as we drink tea near his home in London – is to see the mask slip and get a glimpse of the private emotions that drive every trick, stunt and setup that Brown does. For a start, he’s changed. Gone are the rakish frock coat, startled hair and devilish goatee that he sported at the start of the century. Today his head is shaved and he looks relaxed in jeans and a sloppy pink jumper. His eyes drill right through you, though, when they are not restlessly scanning the room.
When I ask where he got this desire for power over people, Brown recalls his days as a shy, gay, unsporty Christian pupil at a sporty public school, where he struggled to reconcile his emerging sexuality with his faith. ‘They can sniff it out, can’t they?’ he says. ‘School is such an unforgiving environment.’ For selfdefence, he acted larger than life and showed off with magic tricks. ‘I responded by being fairly intolerable, a terrible attention-seeker.
‘Then when I got to university [he studied law and German at Bristol University], I went to see a hypnotist perform. The people who tend to go up on stage at university gigs like that are the sporty types who really intimidated me back at school.’ He then saw a chance to get his own back on those jocks, by learning hypnosis and making them do something ridiculous in public, like eat an onion thinking it’s an apple – or worse. ‘Suddenly, being seen as a powerful figure as opposed to a ridiculous figure was very appealing.’
And Brown has been seen as a powerful figure ever since his debut Channel 4 show Mind Control in 2000, in which he read the lives of complete strangers before bending them to his will. These days he deals in spectacle. Brown will sift through thousands of volunteers (though he refuses to reveal how he reads them) to find the person most open to his powers of suggestion. Interviews and tests are followed by mini set-ups involving actors to see how compliant people are. The chosen ones are thrust, unwittingly, into an extraordinary situation: usually an elaborate fake scenario on a grand scale involving more actors, a stunt crew and special effects. So a group of pensioners was persuaded to steal a valuable painting in The Great Art Robbery, and a hesitant man called Matt was given the controls of a 737 passenger jet he thought was crashing and became – as the show’s title suggests – a Hero At 30,000 Feet.
‘That made a real difference to him in real life,’ says Brown, who started by setting up scenarios where Matt had to make decisions – then gradually upped the ante without him knowing it. Matt believed he was saving everyone on board, and even after the show he said that turning from ‘zero to hero’ – in his own words – had given him back control of his life.
Brown is as calm as you might hope from a man who has a bestselling ‘anti-self-help self-help book’ called Happy: Why More Or Less Everything Is Absolutely Fine. He says: ‘It is not events out there that cause our problems but our reactions to them.’
A cynic might say that’s easy to suggest when you’re a highly acclaimed, 47-year-old with an estimated €5.6million in the bank, but Brown’s success was created by his insecurity. As a young man he hid shyness behind an act that only ended when he got really famous.
‘I stopped being such a d*** in real life when I started performing, because I funnelled everything into that. Once I started doing television there was never a need to perform off camera. I grew out of it. I stopped doing
I STOPPED BEING SUCH A D*** IN REAL LIFE WHEN I STARTED PERFORMING. I FUNNELLED EVERYTHING INTO THAT
tricks with people in real life.’
Still, everyone expects Brown to be able to see into their soul or to secretly manipulate them, and that’s exhausting. ‘I’ve got a good friend who was convinced when we first met that I was controlling him – everything, every gesture, every turn of a cup.’
Brown leans forward as he says this, turns the tea cup in front him with a deliberate action and looks up with a sly smile, holding my gaze. ‘It took a few meetings before I convinced him. All of that’s so far from my mind.’
Is he controlling me now? He insists not. ‘When I go out and do a show, that’s the best version of me. But doing it in real life all the time? That would be sad.’
Does his public persona make it difficult to have a genuine relationship with a lover? ‘Not really. The guy I’m with now, Justin, was aware of me when we met but not like a big fan or anything. Dating a fan would be a bit odd.’
Brown’s father was a swimming teacher and his mother a former model. As a youngster, his evangelical faith told him homosexuality was a sin and he even took part in a counselling course to try to ‘cure’ himself. He stopped believing in God in his 20s, but it wasn’t until his 30s – in 2007 – that he came out.
Has he ever used his powers to get a date? ‘No. I honestly don’t even know what it would mean to hypnotise someone into a date, or anything else. I just keep it for the stage.’
How does he feel about those pick-up artists who use psychology to approach their ‘targets’ on the street or in bars? Their techniques – revealed in a controversial book called The Game by Neil Strauss – aren’t so far away from some of what Brown does.
‘No, they’re not, and it’s so easy to sniff at them but I know somebody who absolutely used them and now has a wife and a couple of kids.’ Still, pick-up artists have been widely condemned as creepy and Brown is not a fan. ‘I think so many of those techniques, and what passes as hypnosis in that world, is just doing stuff and not feeling guilty – being unpleasant and cynical and not feeling bad about it.’
Off stage, Brown is scrupulously polite, quiet and eager to please. He likes to read, paint and take street photographs.
Later this year he will try to break America, having tested the waters in New York in 2017. His first original Netflix special will also be based in the States.
‘It’s very exciting. I can’t say yet what it is, but I was tweeting a while back appealing for American Right-wingers and Leftwingers, so politics certainly plays a part.’
Brown is alarmed that we are all being manipulated by political party advertisers and leaders, including Trump.
‘It’s a classic hypnotic technique, to induce confusion, then give a direct suggestion that someone is more likely to follow because it’s a relief,’ he says. ‘So politicians will give you a whole load of statistics and things you can’t quite follow, then say: “Therefore, we must do this...” And you believe it because you’ve just heard all this stuff you haven’t quite followed.’
You might imagine Brown’s fame would make it harder to get British audiences to go along with him during live performances,
but he says the opposite is true. ‘People are more suggestible if they know – or even just imagine – that I’m constantly doing stuff to influence them.’
This led to some astonishing results in one of his most recent shows, Miracle, as he sought to expose and recreate the way faith healers work. Like them he called people to the stage and offered instantaneous healing, but without the prayer.
‘I imagined somebody might have a bit of a bad back and come up and say: “I feel better.” Essentially the adrenaline would clear the pain. But it was so much more than that.’
To his amazement, genuine healings appeared to happen. ‘Every night, someone with tinnitus would put their hand up and say it had gone. And there was a 60-something guy with trigger finger, where a finger or thumb locks. He couldn’t believe it – he could move his fingers.’ So what was happening there? ‘I did nothing other than create this environment whereby he would stop telling himself the story of “I can’t move my fingers.” That’s all I’m doing. Maybe there’s something in breaking a negative cycle and doing something positive for a bit. Then the shock at feeling: “Oh God, it’s not hurting!” That gets the adrenaline going even more.
‘I saw how you can start to go mad, to the point I was semi-seriously saying to the guys I work with: “I could do this at the O2. I could be very upfront and say it’s nothing more than suggestion and adrenaline, but a certain percentage of people seem to have really been healed.” You start to go down that slippery slope into thinking you have some kind of special ability.’
So why didn’t he hire the O2? ‘No matter how carefully you advertised it, you’d still have people turning up desperate for a real healing.’
He won’t say which of his greatest hits are featured in the new show, but what about his biggest flop? ‘The most excruciating was in the show Infamous,’ he says. ‘There was a running gag about not being able to read someone’s phone number like a bad psychic, just getting the zero and the seven and leaving it there.
‘Then, at the very end of the show, I’m getting numbers called out by the audience, I’m doing all this lightning calculation and the grand total of multiplication is the big reveal. “This is your phone number!” Only, this one night, it wasn’t. Not even close!’
They probably thought it was yet another mind game. ‘Yeah, they might have gone: “That certainly made him seem human.” That’s always a plus point. But not during the finale!’
His laughter is edgy, because the old shyness is never far from the surface. The mistake clearly caused him distress. But the answer was to go back over the show with forensic precision, examine what went wrong, and make sure it never happened again. In other words, to take back control.
Later, I tell a friend Brown was very human, even charming. But when I think of the precise way he turned the cup as if it was some kind of mind-control signal, and the mysterious smile he gave me at that moment, I wonder: ‘Is that what he told me to say?’
Derren Brown: Underground tours Dublin, Belfast and Cork from May 15 to May 31.
I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT WOULD MEAN TO HYPNOTISE SOMEONE INTO DATING ME