Derren Brown interview: ‘Magic is childish, you’re just trying to impress people’
“There are people who can naturally command a room. I’m not one of them…” These are surprising words from the magician who once shot himself in the head live on TV in a game of Russian roulette.
Backstage at the Criterion Theatre ahead of his new show, Unbelievable, the magician Derren Brown is telling me the process of making a show doesn’t come naturally. “I just felt myself shrinking away,” he says. “It was really tough.”
On stage Brown is enigmatic and formidable, but with his arm outstretched across the back of a sofa in a theatre manager’s office, he’s far softer. He always appears deep in thought and is often self-effacing. When he pauses to think exactly how to express himself, he closes his eyes tightly, and sounds genuinely uplifted when I call his noughties stunts – he also once predicted the lottery live on TV – historical moments of telly.
“Woooowww,” he says. “That’s nice.” Brown may not be on TV much these days (he’s turned down offers, more on that later) but he sells out theatre tours that stretch over years, with his latest, Showman garnering five star reviews. It uses magic to ask existential questions about life in a way that shows magic can still feel fresh and relevant.
One of the lines Brown is touting in both Showman and Unbelievable is “every day we perform a magic trick.” It’s a statement about the way we communicate with people, choosing which parts of ourselves we show and which parts we hide.
Unbelievable is the 52-year-old’s first foray behind the stage, into the director’s chair. He doesn’t appear in the show at all, an experience he found challenging. “I didn’t expect how nerve wracking it would be,” he says. “Things go wrong and you can’t do anything about it when you’re sitting in the audience. It’s better to be on stage when something’s falling apart.”
The show incorporates live musical elements and dancing, and has a Vaudevillian sensibility, celebrating old-fashioned magic tricks like balls-in-cups, beheadings and making people disappear from creepy-looking wardrobes.
It’s a family show for mainstream audiences, even more so than his statement TV shows, quite dissimilar to the caricatured paintings and books on philosophy Brown works on when he’s at home.
“A couple of years ago I had a ghost train open at Thorpe Park and a couple of months after, a book had come out I’d written on Greek philosophy,” he says. “I remember thinking, whatever it is I do, it’s quite nice it has this range. Magic’s quite a childish thing really. You’re just trying to impress people and you’re just going, ‘hey, look at me, aren’t I clever?’ Generally it’s the bottom line so I’d have definitely grown out of it if it hadn’t been for the fact my career took off. So in order to keep it interesting I tried to bring into it stuff from the rest of my life I find interesting. Like with this show, we’ve tried to bring stuff to it to make it more than just ‘how do you do those tricks?’”
Brown was attracted to the “egoless” reality of stepping away from the stage, and admits that after an arduous process, it feels good to have got through previews. “It’s just lovely to have a real change and do something different and I love working with performers, that’s been a really enjoyable part of it.”
Curiously, everyone on stage is an actor, no magicians are involved, “which is kind of nice,” adds Brown, reiterating the point about ego: “because then you don’t get that ego thing that gets in the way of a lot of magic.”
After 33 years of performing as a character Brown describes as somewhere between Hannibal Lecter, Willy Wonka and Sherlock Holmes, does he feel he has grown out of it? “I’ve really never thought about it too much,” he says. “I remember in my mid thirties having done a lot of the sort of shows where I was just reading minds out on the street. I was starting to find that a bit frustrating and I wasn’t really enjoying it which is why the TV shows began being me in the background pulling strings while some member of the public, some poor sod, was going through, you know, some thing.
“That allowed me to shift the role, and also dramatically it’s more interesting. If you’re seeing someone struggle with something, you’re watching a hero, that’s a hero’s quest, which is far more interesting than watching someone who can seemingly do anything.” At the end of the day, though, magic “feels like work”.
He’s happiest when he’s engaged in his other creative endeavours at home, where he lives with his partner Justin. Home is where he paints, reads, and writes – things which are all work, though he doesn’t think of them as such.
He’s “probably” quite introverted, he says diplomatically, which is the opposite of his partner who recharges around people. “He goes to festivals and things like that. It just doesn’t do it for me at all.”
Reports that Brown is closed off about talking about his personal life don’t match up to the man I meet, who riffs on the benefits of dating someone with opposite traits, and is happy to chat about what a typical day off together looks like.
“There would be a lot of chores, and laundry and stuff, and then we’d take the dogs out and maybe go and have lunch somewhere. That’d be lovely, then I would hopefully get the afternoon to do those other things,” he says. “It’s nice. We’re very different but we compliment each other.”
As for future TV work, he says he’s keen, but he sounds ambivalent, like when you agree to meet the family on a Sunday but would just as happily stay at home. He had been working on a similar idea to the recent TV show Traitors, but says “obviously” that’s off the table now.
“TV’s moved on,” he reflects. “Things I might have thought of doing back then have now become more mainstream. It would be lovely to do something exciting and different that had a feel of that ‘eventiness’ but because people watch TV differently today, it would have to be based around something that was happening live in the real world, not as a thing that’s gonna be on Channel 4 at 9 o’clock on Friday. I don’t know what that is yet, I’ll have to give it some thought.”
A publicist comes in to wrap up our conversation and Brown seems dismayed. “Knaw!” he exclaims. “It’s been so nice!” It’s one of the warmest responses I’ve ever had to an interview, but more than that, it helped me understand why he prefers the theatre to live TV. Brown is a natural at the art of conversation, he relishes human connection. When he gets back on stage, I’d recommend you go and make that connection, too.
- Tickets to Unbelievable at the Criterion are available now