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[0:06] Gordon Cox: Welcome to Stagecraft, Variety's Theatre Podcast, bringing you backstage and behind the scenes with the stars and creators of the hottest shows on Broadway, off Broadway, and beyond.

[0:17] Gordon Cox: I'm your host, Gordon Cox.

[0:20] Gordon Cox: On this episode of Stagecraft, I'm talking to Derren Brown. He's a bit different from the usual guests we have here on Stagecraft. He's not quite an actor or a writer or a director, or maybe he's all of those things all at once. He's a mentalist and illusionist who performs regularly in the UK, including runs on the West End. He's written books, and he has a series of specials on Netflix. In 2017, his show Secret wowed audiences at Off Broadway's Atlantic Theatre Company. And this fall, he's back for presenting Secret on Broadway in a run that starts previews September 6th. Brown is here with me to tell us about the theatrics of magic, the magic of theater, and why he's banned from every casino in the UK. Hi Derren, thanks for joining me.

[1:02] Derren Brown: Thank you for being joined by me.

[1:08] Gordon Cox: So your work is not the most traditional kind of theater, but it is obviously highly theatrical, and you actually start off the show Secret talking about stories and how we tell ourselves stories and also how they're wrong. But how do you think of your work in relation to more traditional theaters? Because you're often performing on these stages where, you know, like there was a play in this theater that you just saw that you're about to perform in.

[1:33] Derren Brown: Yeah, King Lear.

[1:34] Gordon Cox: Yeah, exactly. I feel like I've got feet in different pies to mix up metaphors, hopefully. So I, one part of me is a sort of this sort of mentalist magician figure. But I think I've grown out of the initial urge you have as a magician of any sort, which is to impress people. That it's the quickest, most fraudulent route to impressing others. As I've grown up, I think I had to take it to a different place. I had to take it to somewhere that was, I think, just better drama. I don't worry about whether what I'm doing is theatre or this or is it art or is it whatever, but I do think what's important is drama. Now this is a conversation I've had with Teller quite a lot of Penn and Teller. He made the point that if you're a magician of any sort and you can make stuff happen by clicking your fingers, you're sort of a god figure.

So that dramatically that's not very interesting. We find heroes interesting, obviously, but hero means you have to suffer, and there's sort of a challenge of some sort, and etc. So I think that makes magic generally quite bad theatre. Over the years, with my stage work, I've taught every year in England for maybe the last, I don't know, 18, 19 years or so, and also have a number of TV shows.

[3:07] Derren Brown: Right. Too. So Tot Who and Where?

[3:09] Gordon Cox: Tot Who and Where? Okay.

[3:11] Derren Brown: It's my charming accent. Toured, I'm very frightened, yes. I have toured every year, the non-tour. So as I've grown up, I found a way of making the TV dramatically more sound. The stage shows have kind of still have a little bit of that kind of look at me feel because it's kind of unavoidable. But I try and make the shows about the audience and try and make them about something that is, Peter Brook used to talk about a kernel that you should leave a play with a kernel of something that you take away. If it's spelt out too much, then it's sort of just like a more of a political tract than a piece of theatre. You want to work it out for yourself, but you want to have a kernel. So I try and leave a sort of a kernel of something. Beyond that, I don't worry too much. I just try and blow the heads off the audience.

[4:03] Gordon Cox: Do you have a, were you a theater kid or something? I mean, you obviously know about theatre, have an understanding of performance. You just mentioned Peter Brook; nobody mentions Peter Brook unless you're...

[4:10] Derren Brown: I can mention a little bit.

[4:14] Gordon Cox: No, like, this might be the first mention of Peter Brook on this podcast; you'll be happy. So, was that, were you a theatre kid? Did you see, what's your sense of sort of what a good performance is?

[4:27] Derren Brown: I didn't start going to the theatre. I'm a law graduate. I studied law and German at Bristol University in England, and I started watching. There was a very, very good Shakespeare troupe in this city of Bristol in the west of England, and I think outside of, you know, school trips, I think that was really when I first started to go, and I just fell in love with the tragedies in particular. I've never quite made my peace with the histories, and the comedies are very rarely funny, but the tragedies, I just, they were great, but they were great productions of them, and they just broke me every time I went to them. So I think my love of it all started quite late. And now I see a fair amount. I end up going to musical theatre a lot. I have a lot of friends in musical theatre. I don't particularly like musical theatre.

[5:20] Derren Brown: Not yet. So I end up seeing a lot of them, and more, I mean, out of proportion to actually how much it generally interests me. Although, having said that, I've seen some great things because of that. But yeah, now in England, in London, there's a great scene for that. And of course now I'm here on Broadway. So I hopefully on my Monday nights and occasional Sunday nights, I'll go and see things.

[5:43] Gordon Cox: And when did you, were you intending to be a lawyer? Were you an attorney? When did you discover magic, I guess?

[5:50] Derren Brown: I did not want to be a lawyer or a German. I saw a hypnotist perform in my first year, so I was 12. I was 19 or so, 18, 19, and I saw this guy perform, and it was a hypnosis show, but it wasn't making people look stupid, which is the normal route they go. So I came home and just thought, well, I'm not gonna...

[6:12] Gordon Cox: Do you not do that consciously? Make people look stupid?

[6:14] Derren Brown: Yeah, do you avoid making people look stupid or steer away from the street?

[6:19] Gordon Cox: Because I never felt stupid watching Secret, which I feel like I feel stupid all the time watching audience.

[6:25] Derren Brown: Well, it's not a hypnosis show. I mean, I started off as a hypnotist, and because the only hypnotist I'd seen was a really fun show, but it was grown up; nobody was being made to look ludicrous. Which of course made it much funnier because you were laughing out of amazement rather than, oh, it's funny because someone's simulating sex with a mop or something. That's only as funny as that is, whereas jaw-droppingly, all I can do is laugh because I can't believe why somebody... I remember a guy who couldn't remember the number seven, so he's counting his fingers and he keeps counting to eleven and can't understand why. And it was just sort of amazing. So I came home deciding, right, I'm gonna learn how to do that. And I did, so I borrowed and stole every book I could find on the subject, practiced with all the students around me. And now it's only really a part of what I do.

[7:12] Gordon Cox: Yeah, I was gonna say how much is hypnotism related to what we see on stage now?

[7:12] Derren Brown: I don't use it overtly, but the sort of technology behind it, the suggestion behind it is something I use a lot, and I mix those suggestive and hypnotic techniques with the techniques of the magician, which was my other kind, which became my kind of main way of earning money for most of my early career because the trouble with hypnosis is that there's only certain environments you can present it in a mature way; otherwise, it's just, you know, it is making people have sex with mops. I didn't want to do that, so I actually spent most of my time doing close-up card magic and things.

[7:12] Gordon Cox: I was just gonna ask how you think of what you do in relation to card tricks or making the Statue of Liberty disappear or making somebody float or signing.

[8:04] Derren Brown: Yeah, it's definitely a different world. Well, the technical term for it is mentalism. When I started doing it, which was maybe 20 years, more than... What am I talking about? 30?

[8:15] Gordon Cox: What are you?

[8:15] Derren Brown: Yeah, about... I'm 48 now. Yes, I know. I don't know. I know you don't look at it.

[8:15] Gordon Cox: You don't look at it.

[8:15] Derren Brown: Very kind. Very expensive moisturizer. I, there were maybe I only knew of four other people that did it, so I started doing it because I thought it was more interesting to tell someone what they were thinking of than to, you know, find their card in a deck of cards or whatever. And then my TV career happened a little while after that, and it became quite popular, and I think there's a lot more mentalists now, and that's I think mainly my fault. In the same way that David Blaine doing his street magic created a whole generation of magicians doing magic in a much cooler way than it was done before.

[8:59] Gordon Cox: But you started performing live, I'm guessing, before the TV thing happened. Is that right?

[9:03] Derren Brown: I was a sort of a bit of a jobbing magician that you might hire for your events, doing occasional hypnosis shows, and I'd written a couple of books for magicians. I was interested in bringing these two areas together to form this sort of psychological weird mix of mind magic and... yeah. So mentalism is the technical term. There are many of them around.

[9:25] Derren Brown: Well, there are more of them around than there were before, and it's a very odd area that means different things to different people. So I guess you could, in that category, you could put your charlatan psychics, and also a magician, a conjuring magician doing a sort of a trick with the mind reading theme. So there's a broad range of people that could apply to that label, mentalism.

[9:50] Gordon Cox: And how do you tell us about this show, Secret, and how you sort of conceive it? Because is it arranged around a theme you were interested in getting at? Is it arranged around a series of acts that you feel like you want to string together? I don't tell us a little bit about sort of how those things go together.

[10:06] Derren Brown: It's a bit of both. So I've been drawing for about 18 years or something in the UK, and when the opportunity of coming here came up first at the Atlantic...

[10:07] Gordon Cox: First at the Atlantic, that's right.

[10:19] Derren Brown: ...doing a show at the Atlantic off Broadway first, which was a couple of years ago, it made sense. Well, let's take the best bits from each show and form a show out of that. So if I may never hit this point again, but it's like on paper at least, it's the best show I've done. So there was that on the one hand, in terms of that sort of the content of the show and the things I'm doing in it. But the shows have always been about something other than just look at me, look at the clever things I can do. So this show is about ultimately about the stories that we tell ourselves. I think that any sort of magic, because it's so rooted in cheating, or it's rooted in somebody just sort of posturing and trying to impress you, I think it suffers because of that, and it's not generally taken seriously, which sort of makes sense.

It is a very childish urge, as I said, to impress people. But I think at its heart, it is interesting because it's a great analogy for how we live in the world and the stories that we form. If a magician shows you a card trick, and you go away with the story of what happened. Well, I mean, I thought of a card, and then I looked through the deck and it wasn't there and it was in my pocket.

[11:32] Derren Brown: That's impossible. How did that happen? And then as you tell other people that story, because you don't want to look like a schmuck yourself fooled by something easy, you start to exaggerate it a little, and your own memory becomes confused. Um, and you end up with a story that's very convincing. But what you've done is you've edited a real, an actual story. The idea that the hand is quicker than the eye is a bit of a myth. Normally, the secret to what's happening is happening right in front of you, but you aren't paying attention to it because you don't think it's important because the magician isn't seeming to make it important. Um, so and this is what happens in life all the time. We have this infinite data source coming at us.

There's an infinite number of things that we could be thinking about or paying attention to, but we choose what to pay attention to, we edit and delete, and we make up this story about what's happening to make sense of what's going on. Of course, we have to do that because otherwise we couldn't really ever navigate the world at all. But perhaps nowadays more than ever, an awareness that these are just narratives, and that includes, by the way, the idea of owning your narrative, which is, you know, kind of a bit of a sort of cliché at the moment, but that is still just another story. The very idea of a narrative, the idea of, you know, being huddled around a fire telling a story, which is sort of at its heart, what that image is, is in its inherent coziness, is shutting out a world that exists further away, outside of that sort of, you know, fire clearing, a whole world of things that are being excluded.

And of course, that's what a magician's doing. There's all this other stuff going on you don't know about, but he's making you tell yourself a certain story. So I think it resonates. I think there is actually something really valuable about magic, but it's not very often tapped into. So that for me is ultimately the heart of the show, apart from all the sheer fun and mayhem of it.

[13:18] Derren Brown: And how do you think about structuring a show in terms of pacing and, you know, what order you do the acts and what do you call them? Acts, tricks or, uh, yeah, yeah, things. Um, pieces, I suppose. Um, I mean, is it like a traditional sort of storytelling build, except in a more in a mood like mood board kind of way? There's a lot more structure to it than you're aware of normally until you get to the end and then you realize, ah, you know, there was more going on here than I thought. Um, hopefully. Hopefully, people think that. Um, so there's yes, there's a lot of threads that are being tied together. There's, uh, pacing is hugely important. Light and shade and pacing is a huge part of getting the thing right, which again I think is lost. I work with the director, which is just gonna ask about that. You work with the color. So that helps enormously. And we've worked together since day one.

[14:23] Derren Brown: And where does he come? Was he come from the theater? Is he, uh, and well I should have two directors, Andrew O'Connor and Andy Nyman. Um, so they have both worked with me from the first day of making TV, which for me was 2000. So we've worked, the three of us have worked very closely together on everything I've done from day one. And others have come and gone, but it's been the three of us at the core. So they're both from the world of magic, they're both from the world of theatre. Andy Nyman is, um, an actor who at the moment is playing Tevy in Fiddler on the Roof and a great production in, um, in London. Oh, okay. Um, not only is he doing that, his own, um, stage show that he wrote, uh, called, uh, Ghost Stories and started, and I believe co-directed, I believe co-directed and co co-wrote and co-directed, I believe.

Um, which is a huge hit, and has been a big movie as well. That's reopening again, uh, in the West End, and he has this show opening in Broadway. I don't know if that's ever happened, uh, to anybody. It's quite a hat trick. Uh, so that's Andy Nyman, who's a dear friend and a phenomenal actor, and Andrew O'Connor is my co-producer, so he runs the production company as well that sort of is behind these things with me. And, um, he's also from the world of magic, and he's also directed a number of shows and any number of magicians along the way. So yeah, we're a kind of, it was, it's a perfect little, um, group for this sort of project.

[15:41] Derren Brown: And do you think of the build of your show as you sort of string these routines together in terms of, I mean, it must be a choice which one you do last, right? You want to, uh, you sort of build to and what sort of how do you think about the progression of those? Uh, well we've sort of found a bit of a, um, a sort of not exactly a template, but a sort of a structure that works. The first half is, uh, a sort of, uh, a fun thing and a big warm-up, and then the second half, uh, is slightly longer form pieces and gives the sort of maybe the real heart of the show. There's a thing often used in musicals that, you know, the first number after the interval you've got to allow the fat people might not have come back in yet, so nothing really happens, it's just a bit of a fun thing that warms everybody up, and then nothing really progresses until the next number.

So, um, I think it was Eddie Reading, I think I wasn't remember, was it Fossil sometime? I don't know. Well, somebody talking about one of those things. I thought, oh okay, we kind of do that as well. Um, so there's all those things of sort of warming up and massaging the audience a little as well, and then what is important, what we've always tried to do is overdeliver. So the show hopefully does exceed expectations and leave people on a high. Um, but other than that, yeah, we've sort of found an approach which we've really subverted. I've done a lot of shows, so we've subverted it, um, very consciously a few times in a slightly more sort of experimental mode, but largely there's a thing that I find just works, uh, works well.

[17:19] Derren Brown: And yeah, it's, it's a lot of it is to do with pacing and to do with what you, I think you have to earn certain things as a performer, especially, especially with the one man show, and especially if you're not known. I mean, the things that I can do in England now, because I'm known, are different from an audience that don't know me in terms of what you just sort of earn. I mean, there are certain things like, you know, you don't appear to be enjoying the show more than the audience, you know. Oh, that was wow, she's been great tonight. You've all been amazing, you know, those things that, uh, there are certain things you just, you know, just strike the wrong note. So there's, um, a lot of it's that, it's what I've done before, how far that's brought the audience.

It's a, it's a, it's a strange thing. The entire show happens in the minds of the audience. Everything happens in, in your head as an audience member. So if you're watching a play, I guess the performance is somewhere between audience member and actor. So if it goes over your head, it doesn't mean the play's failed. It maybe just means you, you know, you might have just missed something. Um, if you're a composer, and I've had this conversation with many performers. If you're, if you're a, sorry, musician, then the performance is probably somewhere between you and the composer, and the audience is probably sort of incidental if you're a classical cellist, say for example. With what I do, it's all in the minds of the people sat there.

And the show is very much about them, it's very much about the audience. It's not really about me looking clever, it's about the audience. And my toolkit is the what's going on in their head, their sort of ongoing perceptions. So therefore, the structure of the show and the way it's put together is constantly about second-guessing what that experience is. There is no room for anything, you know, going over your head or boring you a little, or I mean, there's room for making people uncomfortable, I suppose, but that's, that's, uh, that's it. And there is so it's a really long waffling answer. I do that I do this. I'm very good at long waffling answers.

[19:06] Derren Brown: But that's interesting. And you talk quite a bit to the audience, and that you bring people on stage. Like there is a ton of audience interaction, which makes some traditional theater goers, uh, roll their eyes or please or what would you say? It's cheap theatre, it's a cheap theatre. Well, exactly. What do you think? Not when it comes to the actual ticket prices, I hope. What would you say to those, um, potentially wary audience members who to assuage them about? Oh, I, I see it a lot on sort of Twitter and so on. I've always had people say, Oh, I don't want to come, I don't want to get involved because there is a lot of audience participation. The answer is very simple. I throw frisbees out to choose people.

So if you don't want to take part and you happen to catch a frisbee, you just pass it to the person next to you. I would hate to come up. I, I'm I hate any sort of, um, involvement on stage unless I really sort of love the performer. And that's part of your job on stage, I think if you are asking people up to make sure that that's a comfortable, um, thing. But, um, but yeah, there's no, no, there's no compulsory involvement at all. But it is, it is absolutely a show of people getting involved, yeah.

[20:06] Derren Brown: Which is, yeah, it's kind of, um, it's kind of cheap theatre in a way, but how, but how variable is the show from night to night? Uh, very much so, very much so. I have a, so I have based on the audience members you've got to do. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So I kind of follow the same structure every night, and there are some bits that are absolutely set, although they wouldn't necessarily feel like that. It's a very interesting show to see a second time, which I really recommend. Um, I will, I haven't had a chance. I haven't started previews yet, but, uh, although it's been a couple years since I saw it the last time. Oh, you'd have to do it. Well, I saw it at The Atlantic, yeah. Oh, that's lovely.

So yeah, it's the kind of thing that if you watch it again, some bits that appeared, oh, they were only happening that night. Oh, they obviously happen every night, and other bits that felt like they must happen every night, you realize, oh, he was just winging that the night I saw it. So that's, that's I guess that's kind of interesting. Um yes, it is, it is very, it is varied because I have to. I mean, it's lovely as a performer because you, I can never just settle back into it. I'm never just repeating lines, I'm never just going through the same thing again. It's, it's in terms of being on your toes and being alive. Sounds a little bit like improv in terms of it is a little bit like that, yeah.

Um, but equally at the same time, there's a deep sense of structure, and there's a, uh, I have to make sure I hit certain points, otherwise the show doesn't show doesn't work, it'll just sort of fail, and the things I need to do I won't be able to do. So it's, um, it's like I'm juggling a lot of plates, yeah, but without making it obvious that I'm juggling anything, trying to make it look like I'm just walking around casually, but there's a huge amount of juggling going on.

[21:32] Derren Brown: Do you are you surprised often by what the things that happen on stage? Um, at this point where they're delighted, like I, I find it delightful. There's something lovely about, and particularly in America, because I think, I think you guys are just, uh, guys and gals and non-binary pals, uh, um, just so much more, um, sort of effervescent and, and comfortable on stage and able to talk about, um, yourselves and your experiences and things, which I, you know, I invite people to do that, and that's very lovely doing that here. It's often a bit awkward in England. And another thing, I noticed in the Atlantic, which was only maybe a, uh, 200-seater, I think, the noise in the response was so far and above the 2,000 seaters that I play in in London.

Because in London or in, in England, generally speaking, there's a sort of, um, there's a, uh, a wadge, a homogenous wadge of a response, a gasp or a, uh, a laugh or a something. There's like a group response, and there in the Atlantic, it was 200 people narrating each of them like narrating their own experience. Fuck, no way! Did you see there was this and I that there is no English equivalent to that? I was genuinely taken aback.

[22:58] Derren Brown: I mean, that that thing of the audience energy is absolutely true. It's like it's like telling a joke and the difference between telling a funny story, the difference between people laughing and just staring at you makes a huge difference. It feeds back into how you tell the story. So it makes a real difference. And it was incredible. So I don't know what that's going to be like in a, you know, a thousand, whatever it is, 1200 seater that the court is and how integral is the setting to the tricks working? Like could how important is it to be surrounded by an audience as you are talking to someone? You know, there is, yeah, there is some, yeah. How much is the setting involved in why the trick works?

Um, there are some things that involve large numbers of people, so obviously that's helpful. But there is, as I said, my kind of toolkit is the stories that are in people's heads, so psychologically, what's happening to them and what happens to you in front if you're invited up on stage in front of an audience of a thousand people is a very different situation than if we just sat here like this. So there's a lot of things that I can do on stage because there is this slightly bewildered and therefore hyper suggestible mode that people move into when they come up on stage. Right. That's sort of invisible to the audience. I mean, we feel a sort of, um, a vicarious kind of, I don't know, an empathy for people that are coming up, but it's a particular mode that people enter into, and that's very helpful for me.

And that not only works on stage, there's definitely some things that take me a lot longer to get working if I'm doing them in real life. I say real life as in like off the stage. Right, yeah. Um, well, that leads to a question, which is how often do you use your powers in real life? I don't in terms of steering the coffee guy to make your coffee right or something. Yeah, no, I, well, I, when I first started, I was definitely kind of the guy that had to show people tricks all the time to impress them. And I didn't like a lot of magicians, it becomes a surrogate for any kind of social skills. Um, and you often sense that in middle-aged magicians, right? I sense a lonely child somewhere in the background.

Um, so there was, I've very much moved away from that, so I never show anybody anything in real life. I really just save it for the, um, save it for the stage. And have you thought about using the same kind of thought processes or ideas or your sort of philosophies in, because what you do in terms of steering people's attention and like pointing them one way and then surprising them in another direction, that's a thing a writer does, you know, for who writes, I don't know, whatever you want to write, a novel, a, uh, a play, uh, a theater, uh, movie. Is there anything, have you ever thought about using the way you think in that direction? Well, I do enjoy, I'm, I'm, I'm writing is a big part of, uh, of my, um, of my time and I enjoy it, uh, hugely.

It's just a matter of time. I think what with what I do with the stage and TV, it takes so much of the year that what I've got left I donate to, uh, or I devote rather and donate to, um, to writing. And I'm working on a, well, I'm doing the show in the evenings, yeah. I'm spending the days writing a follow-up book to this book on happiness. Okay. And that's lovely. That's a really lovely, uh, it's a really lovely rhythm to have. But I think, I think generally it, I, I, it serves me in terms of because life is ultimately about how you connect, isn't it, and how you contribute, and, um, I think where it is useful is I'm probably a more helpful friend, more helpful partner. I'm, I, I've probably got a better instinct for how to help in those situations more than maybe I would have done otherwise.

Because often our natural instincts, you know, say your partner comes home after a stressful day and it just needs to offload. It's so instinctive to say essentially, oh well, that's probably they probably only meant this. I'm sure it's fine. And of course, what you're doing is you're saying, once again, you are not being heard. You spent your whole day not being heard, and that's why you're angry and frustrated. You're now coming home, and I'm not hearing you now either. Um, I'm telling you everything's fine, but obviously it isn't. Um, so I think there's a, given again that all I'm about is what's going on in somebody's head. I think sometimes I find that is useful as a real life skill. But in terms of like, you know, do you use it to get upgrades?

And do you, I am banned from casinos actually in the UK? Oh, delightful. Yeah, because I, um, but I think I, I, um, because if you start card counting and so on, which I mean is a very small part of my world, is those kind of gambling techniques. So I did spend some time devoted to those. And then once you get on the system, any other casino that uses the same, um, you know, security. Yeah, you're then, I suddenly found myself banned from like casinos up and down the length of Britain, which is quite exciting. Um, far more exciting than the reality. So will you go to casinos here? You're not banned here yet. Well, there are sad realities. I'm just not that interested. I was purely, I needed to learn the techniques of, uh, you know, are there ways of, are there ways of beating a roulette wheel or is that just, is that just a myth?

Are there, what are the cards, you know, card counting? Um, there are, but it's a huge amount of effort over a long period of time for a very small return. So it's not worth it. It doesn't really work out as being worth it. But you were, you banned because you walked away with a ton of money from a, no, no, no, not really. I just, they just, I was just practicing card counting and I mean, yes, I suppose yes, I did in a sense. But not, not a vast amount, and ultimately that wasn't what did it. It was me going back and going back that raised suspicions. I don't normally talk about this on podcasts. Um, what are there any themes that you have not yet addressed in your work that you feel like you'd like to address?

Either in a stage show like nursing or in a book or on a TV show. I sort of go with whatever's interesting to me. So the last TV show I did was on, it's, I have a few shows on Netflix. And the last one, uh, is called Sacrifice, and in that show I take an American, uh, Trump supporter who's basically racist, and, uh, get him to lay down or get him to the point where he lays down his life, or try and get him to this point, takes a bullet for a Mexican illegal immigrant. Um, so that's obviously a kind of a show for our sort of current time. So I, I try and let them, what I come to do them sit in whatever feels relevant either to me and or the rest of the world at the time. So I never really think too far ahead.

The show's a varied. Um, I had a show a few years ago called Apocalypse, which was ending the world for somebody. It was a huge project. So the first part was how do you convince someone the world's gonna end? So we, we had cameras in the house for eight months, so the rest of the family's in on it apart from this one guy. We had control of their television, so we made fake news programs with the proper people that do the news and so on, and fed them into his TV. His phone, we could put fake news into his phone. We had, we could drop things into people's Twitter feeds, yeah. All leading to a meteor strike happening, and then we, we staged the meteor strike. We ended the world for him, and then he wakes up in a post-apocalyptic zombie-infested world where he has to find his way home.

And basically lives through the Wizard of Oz, a sort of dark version of the Wizard of Oz when he finds courage, a brain and heart, and finds his way home, and essentially learns the stoic lesson of not taking for granted what you already have, which is, you know, which is what we all do. So the Stoics would practice removing everything, practice poverty in order to value those things when they have them again. Um, that's essentially what we do to him. Um, so the shows have been sort of wild and varied, but there's a, there's a, uh, a sort of thing I often do if one person's in the middle of a giant project and they have no idea. It's like a big Truman show set up, they have no idea they're part of a big hidden camera thing.

So I've been doing those for many years on first of all on Channel 4 in the UK, which I guess is sort of maybe on, I don't know, YouTube if they're accessible here, but now on Netflix. There's a, there's three shows on Netflix, including a recent stage show actually as well. Yeah, we noticed that miracle. Yeah, miracle, which are my last stage show, so you can get a flavor of that too there. Right. Yeah. Um, I'm talking to you a few days before you start, uh, previews, uh, on Broadway work is it? Or are we terrifying? Yes, it is. I've been thinking ahead all beyond the day. Um, what, uh, what do you feel like you need to do between now and that first preview to get yourself ready? I feel very ready.

I, uh, I remember once years ago, my manager saying to me, uh, my very first show, stepping out on stage for the very first time, and he came into my dressing room and said, Don't forget to have fun. Uh, which sounds flippant, but actually, it was incredibly useful information. I've always gone back to, uh, because you can take all those nerves, there is so much you can do because again, there's so much you can't control, you can only control your own thoughts and actions, right? Which is particularly helpful as a performer, particularly helpful if you're auditioning as an actor as well, you which Brian Christmas is. But you are a performer who's spoken about. It's true. You are a performer who may who is trying to control other people's thoughts.

Yeah, but there's only, yeah, yeah, that is true, but there's only so far that can go. Ultimately, I'm in the hands of just doing the show. But the important thing, which then gets missed if you're too nervous, is to have fun. So, um, I just make sure that when I step out, I'm really enjoying it. Um, having said that, I also like the Mike Nichols had a thing, I think he said to, I think it was Glenn Close, and it's written up in a great book called How to Stop Acting, which is one of the best acting books I've read by a man called Harold Guskin. And, uh, Mike Nichols's advice to Glenn Close was to take your day with you on stage. So if you've had a terrible day and you're frustrated by the casting plant, yeah, yeah.

Rather than standing in the winds thinking what is my character feeling at this point, just if you've had a shitty day, take that with you. Step out and be angry. It's like, uh, it's a very, it's just a because I mean, firstly, I'll take, I'll take anything to make that show present and real and a one-off for that moment. That's why I love knowing if I have friends in, or if anybody's in or they're reviewing the show or anything, because it just makes that show right. I'm doing this is now, this is not a repeat of yesterday's. Um, so I also find that very helpful too. But generally speaking, I just want to be in it and enjoying it. So that's the bottom line. The show itself, um, is so ready to go.

It's just bursting at the seams to get out there. So I'm very confident with the actual show. Then it's after that, it's just about my own state, I guess. Well, we look forward to seeing it and the days you bring on with you. Uh, thanks a lot, Derren. Thanks for talking. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you, Gordon.

[33:52] Derren Brown: That was Derren Brown, now in previews on Broadway in Derren Brown Spills His Broadway 'Secret', which has its official opening night September 15th at the Court Theater.

[34:01] Gordon Cox: If you like what you're hearing on this and other episodes of Stagecraft, I'd be very grateful if you took a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. It's a big help. Or tell a friend. I'll be back in two weeks with another new episode. Until then, see you at the theater.