It began with drawing his teachers. The young Derren Brown – a quiet, nervous boy – discovered that he could impress his fellow pupils at the Whitgift School in Croydon by caricaturing authority figures. “It was all a big play for attention,” he says now. “Magic’s also a bit like that – a distancing measure; a way of being impressive if you don’t feel impressive.”
Performing tricks and illusions on television has been Brown’s day job for more than a decade now. Throughout that time, he has also painted celebrity caricatures on vast canvases, further cluttering his taxidermy-stuffed house. In 2009, he gathered them into a book called Portraits. Its cover features a monochrome Clint Eastwood, whose hard-eyed stare is perfectly recognisable despite being placed in a face shaped like a butternut squash.
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