Derren Brown on:
– his stalkers who convince themselves to be in a relationship with Derren
– what he finds frustrating about his critics
– and Rasputin, his parrot
Derren Brown probably knew my questions before I even asked them: he is the country’s best (and most famous) magician after all. Well, I say magician – he would tell me off for that. Illusionist. There’s no such thing as magic. 
I visited Woking for Derren’s touring show Infamous; his opening line that “we are all trapped inside our minds” rather apt for an engrossing evening in which psychological trickery, at its most astonishing, baffles an enchanted audience. Afterwards, the BAFTA-winning mentalist answered York Vision’s questions… about parrots, stalkers, his critics and more.
Derren is known globally for his Channel 4 shows and, at risk of sounding unoriginal, I begin by exploring this fame. When not performing his natural character is one of a reserved nature, so does he actually enjoy his celebrity status bringing both intense public interest and media scrutiny to his daily life? “You don’t find yourself any happier just because you get well known – everything just gets more extreme. It’s quite interesting,” Derren states. “I have several long-term stalker-types who believe themselves to be in a relationship of some sort or another with me.” What, as a lover? “I’m cast as anything from husband, aggressor, attacker, father of their child… and they’re caught up in this presumably completely convincing fantasy. That’s often exhausting and miserable.” So with fame, he declares, “the nice things get nicer and the horrible things get more horrible.”
It becomes clear that life is not all rosy – “as much as I think it’s important to de-stigmatise mental illness and champion the efforts to dispel myths surrounding it, it’s sometimes very tricky to be on the receiving end of people’s psychoses,” – but what about the benefits of his superstar image? “The best thing about being me is that people seem to have decided they like me before we get to know each other, and that’s very nice. One side of the ground work of getting to know people has been done and normally in a positive way. That’s lovely.”
Derren read Law and German at Bristol before embarking on a quite separate career path. “By the time I had graduated I had learnt how to hypnotise and was able to scrape a living together doing that.” He describes his twenties as a “glorious” decade in which he “pottered around cafés with my parrot, doing one magic gig a week to fund my flâneuring needs.” Derren, patron of Lincolnshire’s Parrot Zoo, currently keeps his own blue quaker, Rasputin, with his partner.
It wasn’t until the turn of the millennium when Derren really redefined the genre of ‘magic’ with his Mind Control television series. He is often open (and, to a certain extent, firm) about having no psychic abilities at all; instead he identifies a “suggestible character” and reads body language, which is “less easy than I thought.” Whilst an easily-led drama student might be unsurprisingly responsive, Derren says, he’s “still thrown by characters who seem far more closed off yet toss themselves wide open to suggestion. It remains one of the most fascinating and under-explored aspects of personality.”
Derren presents a sequence of staggering tricks in his live performance, mentioning being bullied in his childhood. With Derren’s foes no longer bullies but critics, I ask for a message to those believing his television work to be simply a setup. “I have no message. You have to let people think what they like in life.” What about the criticism itself? “I’d be disingenuous if I didn’t admit it was frustrating when a few people spread their cynicism on Twitter like it’s fact. Occasionally it’s useful information: I don’t think much of hypnotising someone rapidly in a TV show but am sometimes reminded that people might balk at that and need a clearer explanation of how that’s perfectly possible.” Derren takes the example of Steven from Apocalypse who “looked like a guy in a noodle advert.” This was enough, he says, to start a story of him being an actor. “I guess that would mean his family and friends in the show were all actors too. It makes no sense, but whaddyagonnado? You have to let it go and concentrate on making strong and ambitious work.”
That particular programme, in which Derren persuaded one man to believe the world had ended after a meteorite shower crashed into the earth, raised a number of ethical questions: to what degree is it justifiable to inflict such potentially damaging experiments on unsuspecting individuals? “The responsibility towards the people who take part in the big TV stunts like Steven is very important. Here we are putting someone through a big moral lesson, and through a dark journey to get there, but who are we to presume,” Derren questions. “What right do we have? And how do we know he’ll be all right? These are all important questions to consider,” but he asserts that “we go to great lengths to make sure that they’re answered in detail, even if those aren’t things that form part of the editorial thrust of the show. They’re real-life issues to make sure you get right.”
Yet equally Derren argues he has a responsibility to offer “useful information about supernatural claims, so that people can make good decisions about whether to give their money to people who peddle their wares in those areas.”
“Of course, I generally work with deception too, so I try to put a theatrical framing around what I do – and a clarity of ‘this isn’t real’ – to distinguish it from the work of those who tell you they have genuine paranormal ability. It leads to some interesting performance areas where belief can be played with or challenged in a rewarding way.” Indeed the second half of Infamous sees volunteers assemble on a dark stage to become Derren’s puppets as he investigates the “possibility of mediumship. I sometimes re-create the work of psychics and mediums – hopefully more convincingly – but there has to be a kind of conflicting and simultaneous meta-message that it’s all nonsense. That we fool ourselves with this kind of thing.”
It is clear that Derren’s sharp and perspicacious character makes his psychological manipulation so impressive – and this enigmatic persona even leaves me wondering whether his rare live-show mistakes are actually deliberate, in order to keep us believing. Surely nobody, without the aid of some crafty and discrete behind-the-scenes assistance, would play Russian Roulette on live television? Surely nobody could convince ordinary people to commit armed robberies in the street, successfully predict the National Lottery, or hypnotise a man to assassinate Stephen Fry?
For a lot of his followers, the fun is not knowing. And I don’t think it matters… Derren’s work brings wonder and delight to an enormous number of people right across the world and, as Derren himself once hinted, there is no question he is a national treasure.