Derren Brown on the real secret of his craft: ‘Magic is sort of easy’

The illusionist is returning to the West End. He talks about losing his religion, his father’s death and how a night with Bill and Hillary Clinton turned him into ‘a social wreck’

Curator's Note

This one’s a Sunday Times interview, not a review, and it’s a good one. Dominic Maxwell visits Derren Brown at home ahead of Only Human opening at London’s Apollo Theatre on October 10, and Brown gets more candid than usual. He says magic is “sort of easy,” and his point is worth sitting with: the tricks aren’t the hard part, making them matter is. He talks about building the show around the audience, what he learned when Unbelievable didn’t work, and why he borrows Howard Thurston’s habit of reminding himself backstage that he loves his audience. There’s also a great story about dinner with the Clintons that shows how different the stage Derren is from the introvert at home. If you perform for a living, this is a masterclass in thinking about why, not just how. Bonus: a new Channel 4 series, Incognito, is coming early next year.

Dominic Maxwell September 26, 2026 10:00 pm London Comment

At the Birmingham Hippodrome, Derren Brown has just sent almost 2,000 people out onto the street. “This is not the show,” he quips apologetically from the stage after an alarm has convinced the stage manager of the need for an immediate evacuation.

Yet as we shuffle out, loiter outside and finally file back into the theatre, the muttering among the crowd is that, yes, surely, come on, this is the show. “Derren’s playing at something, don’t you think?” my neighbour enthuses. It’s hard to imagine what maverick mental manipulations the nation’s favourite magician is applying to us quite so laboriously, but who knows?

This is the man who broke through to national fame in 2003 by playing Russian roulette live on air. On his subsequent TV specials we saw him guide volunteers through landing planes, or beating the bookies, or robbing banks, or pushing someone off a building. A phoney fire alarm, to liven up his 12th live show? Doesn’t seem beyond the realms.

“Oh, you were there that night?” Brown says a few weeks later, making us coffee from his espresso machine, when I meet him at his home. He smiles affably. “Sorry about that.” There was, as became clear through the rest of the Birmingham evening, no canny scheme at play. Yet muddying the waters between what is sincere and what is fake, what is plan and what is mishap, has been key to his success in the 26 years since he arrived on Channel 4 with his first show, Mind Control.

In 2000, in an early phase that came complete with goatee, cape and dyed hair, he referred to himself as a “psychological illusionist”. A term he had made up. He has long described his act as mixing “magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection and showmanship”, which is misdirection and showmanship in itself, isn’t it? Doesn’t that list just describe what it is to be a magician? On this the thoroughly agreeable Brown, 55, disagrees.

“I’m trying to keep it ambiguous because I’m rooted in hypnosis and I’m rooted in conjuring. They didn’t really join up before, not that I knew about.” He still hypnotises volunteers every night as part of Only Human, which arrives in the West End next month.

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