That Time a Magician Who Almost Let Someone Shoot Him

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Someone once said that if you really want to see how many people would miss you if you died, stop paying bills for a month. Well, back in 2003 British illusionist, Derren Brown did something similar by asking how many people would be willing to help him play Russian roulette and 12,000 people stepped up. 

For anyone unfamiliar with Brown’s work, over in Blighty he’s famous for his TV specials and stage shows during which he utilises a combination of psychoanalysis, suggestion and misdirection to troll the shit out of audiences and generally dick around. Over the last few years Derren has used his skills to convince a guy it was the end of the world, correctly predict that week’s winning lottery numbers and once manipulated a bunch of total strangers into robbing an armoured car, just to see if he could.

Then again, how could you not trust this guy?
Then again, how could you not trust this guy?

Arguably Derren’s most extreme stunt, or at least the one that took the most balls, was the time he claimed that he was going to play Russian roulette, with a real gun, live on air. You’re probably wondering what the “trick” here was, well, according to Derren, the idea was for him to put his skills of lie detection and suggestion to the test by allowing an impartial third party to load a bullet into a revolver (which was modified so that nobody could see where the bullet was) and then attempt to guess which chamber it was in by gauging their reaction as he put a loaded gun next to his own face.

Pictured: "Magic"
Pictured: “Magic”

To decide who got to help him potentially commit suicide, Brown put out an open call for volunteers only to be inundated with responses from people who probably way too eager to potentially be an accessory to suicide. After narrowing down the volunteers to a group of 5 men, Brown selected one who loaded a single bullet into a revolver, which Brown put against his own head and pulled the trigger 5 times, before firing the final shot into a nearby sandbag.

Like any good magician, Brown has never revealed exactly how the trick was done, or even if it was a trick at all, however, after the stunt resulted in thousands of calls to the police, presumably from people who turned on the TV and figured it was a bizarre hostage situation, the police were quick to issue a statement saying that the bullet was a blank. Which, well, didn’t mean shit, because, believe it or not, blanks can totally kill you if you fire them when the gun is pressed right against your head since there’s still a whole ton of shit inside those bullets that has to go somewhere. Somewhere being the inside of your fucking skull/

Luckily, nothing happened to Brown, which was probably a good thing, because otherwise we would have never gotten to see him to teach all those old people to become high-profile art thieves.

Yes, this is the sort of thing that happens for entertainment in the UK, eat shit, reality TV.