Listen: Derren Brown Spills His Broadway ‘Secret’

Derren Brown has spent a lot of his career performing magic shows on theater stages — but he’ll be the first to tell you that magic usually doesn’t make for great theater.

“If you’re a magician of any sort, you can make stuff happen with a click of your fingers and you’re sort of a god figure … Dramatically, that’s not very interesting,” the mentalist and illusionist said on Stagecraft, Variety’s theater podcast. “We find heroes interesting, and being a hero means that you have to suffer, and there’s a challenge of some sort. So that makes magic generally, I think, quite bad theater.”

For Brown — who recently kicked off a Broadway run of his Off Broadway hit Derren Brown: Secret—the trick to making drama out of magic lies in making his shows about the audience, and in giving the crowds something to think about. For the rest of the interview LISTEN HERE.