Illusionist and mind-bending trickster Derren Brown once had to use his powers to prevent a fight.
The TV and stage star revealed that he actually made his would-be assailant cry after he used a mental technique on him. Speaking about the confrontation, Brown explained he diffused the situation so well that he ended up comforting the man.
“I had a weird confrontation in the street. It was about midnight in north Wales and a guy came up with his girlfriend, really drunk, really aggressive, trying to start a fight,” he told Lad Bible.
He went on to explain: “In all those situations if someone says ‘what you looking at?’ or ‘do you want a fight?’ or whatever, there’s no way of answering those questions without digging yourself deeper into this relationship that they’ve established.
“The key is to completely ignore what they’re setting up and set up something yourself. So, I said to him ‘The wall outside my house isn’t four foot high,’ and now he’s feeling like he’s missed something because it makes sense as a statement but it doesn’t make any sense in the situation.
He added: “If somebody does that you don’t automatically go ‘why is that?’ – you think you’ve missed something, you come a bit bewildered and you kind of become very suggestible.”
Brown said his original idea was to make the man’s feet “stick to the floor” or make a “daring escape”, but he ended up “talking rubbish” about walls that made sense but was out of context.
Brown then revealed: “He ended up properly breaking down – ended up in tears. He just had all this adrenaline looking to fight and it just had nowhere to go. Weirdly, I ended up sat with him on the curb talking about what had happened that evening. His girlfriend had bottled somebody or something – they’d had a massive drunken argument.”
However, the illusionist made sure to clarify that this technique should not be deployed in aggressive or dangerous situation. Brown said that if anyone was thinking of replicating his diffusing technique then they needed to make sure it wasn’t in a life-threatening moment, like a knife attack.
The illusionist is currently gearing up for a run of shows in London at the Apollo from December 2022 to March 2023. Fans of his unusual skillset can also watch his specials on Netflix, with the streaming service having commissioned three unique projects from Brown to date.
Derren Brown’s Netflix specials The Push, Mirracle: Faith or Fiction and Sacrifice are available to stream on Netflix now.
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