Keith Barry: I always made sure that I spend time with my kids, even though I'm a workaholic
Keith Barry: reconnecting with audiences, with new live and television shows. Pic: Moya Nolan
Keith Barry is reading my mind over Zoom. “I want you to think of somebody that you know who has passed on,” says Ireland’s best-known magician (he prefers “brain hacker”). “Somebody you personally knew – not a famous person. And somebody who brings back a feel-good factor. I wouldn’t want you getting upset. Zone in on their initials. Just their initials.”
Scrambling slightly, I think of a grandparent. Next, Barry scrawls methodically on a whiteboard, which he then holds to the camera. Incredibly, he has scribbled the initials of the person about whom I was thinking. The faintest chill pricks the back of my neck.
This is a history lesson as well as a virtual parlour trick. Barry is explaining the process of “automatic writing”, popular with occultists in the late 19th century. It was said to involve the dead taking control of the writer’s hand and sending a message from beyond the veil.
Barry, like Houdini before him, is famously a skeptic and does not believe in the supernatural. So how did he do it? He obviously didn’t commune with my deceased grandparent. And he certainly didn’t clamber inside my head and scry my brain cells. Perhaps I subconsciously mouthed the letters as I thought of them? Maybe I blinked in a revealing way. Did the manner in which my eyes rolled around my head function as a sort of mind-hacking morse code?
“Here’s the thing,” says Barry. “If I answer that now, you have no conversation to have later on with your friends and family over a dinner table. Right now, you do. It’s a mystery. A mystery to be potentially solved in your head. Or not solved. That’s what I love about what I do. Mystery is what keeps people coming back. They know I’m going to push them to the edge of the cliff. I’m going to dangle them over there for a while. I’m going to always pull them back and send them home safely – the better for their experience.”
Barry (45) is Ireland’s most successful magician of the mind (on his website he describes himself as “Mentalist, Magician & Subconscious Mind Specialist”). This is testament to his talents as a conjurer. And also to his outgoing personality. And, after two years of lockdown, with his new show Reconnected starting in late April, he is relishing the opportunity to stand once again in front of an audience. You get the impression he’s been pining for it across the past 24 months.
“I’m friends with a number of entertainers. We're not in it for the money,” he says. “Money is important to everybody. Let's not belittle money. When people say ‘oh, you know money is not everything…’. Well, it helps with a lot of things. I’m certainly not a magician or mentalist for the money.”
There are, he points out, more straightforward ways to earn a living. “At one stage in my life, I considered becoming a vet. I was a cosmetic scientist. I was good at cosmetic science. I could have made a lot of money doing that, right? It’s in my DNA to be on a stage. I need to be on a stage. I’d do it for free if I had to. I do loads of charity work for free. So it’s a big missing part of my life that I need to regain.”
During the lockdown he scratched that itch a little by performing over the web. Of course, that’s not at all the same as going before of a crowd. Hence , which includes two dates in Cork Opera House in May and which is all about engaging with the world after living for an extended period in our own sealed-off realities.
“It's not just called . The show is themed to actually genuinely reconnect people,” he explains.
“To reconnect them emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, physically. So the start of , and I don’t mind telling you, I’m going to teach half the audience how to hack into the other half of the audience’s mind. I’ve never done anything even close to that before. And the weird thing is, one half won’t know how the other half have hacked into their brains. Everybody immediately will explode with this moment of wonder and amazement. It’s a beautiful way to open the show.”
Barry was born in Waterford City in 1976. He discovered the arcane arts at age 14 when he read . He quickly became obsessed, describing himself as the kid at school “who wanted to use the Ouija board all the time,”.
His career was off to a roaring start in 2003 when he filmed his first series, (he has another, , starting on Saturday Apri l on RTÉ 1). There were dark periods, too. In 2007 he was involved in a head-on collision outside Newry and was lucky to survive.
“I should probably have been killed,” he later reflected. “My foot was wrapped around my shin. I was five minutes from amputation. They couldn't get the foot back in.”
Two years later, his 82-year-old grandfather was attacked by burglars in his home in Mount Sion, Waterford, and later died. “It's time for the whole country to stand up against these guys and say enough is enough. We need to feel safe in our own homes,” Barry said at the time.
Over the course of the pandemic, many people reflected anew on their work-life balance. And vowed to prioritise family over career when normality returned. However, Barry, who lives in Straffan, Co Kildare, with his wife, Máiréad Foley, and children Breanna (12) and Braden (nine), feels he always had a good handle on what matters and what doesn’t.
“I always spend enough time with my wife and my kids,” he says. “Last weekend we went to Dingle for three days. And I didn't work at all. We played cards and went swimming. I was always mindful of spending enough time with my family. I think a lot of successful business people and certainly a lot of entertainers, they don't proportion that fully into their lives. Before they blink, their kids are growing up. I always have made sure that I spend enough time with my kids, even though I'm a workaholic as well. So, when the pandemic hit, I didn't really feel like I needed to spend more time with them. I didn't feel like I needed to shut down and reorientate.”
Barry has brushed shoulders with many a-listers across the span of his career. He has starred in several TV “specials” broadcast in the US, where he dazzled stars such as Elijah Wood (aka Frodo from Lord of the Rings) and Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger. And he was an adviser on the heist films and , starring Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg.
“All these superstars and massive celebrities – at the bones of it, they're the same as us,” he says. “They suffer the same confidence issues or lack of confidence issues. They’re the same. I do find that these people, these big celebrities, they have a massive work ethic. When I was working on the movies I was on set about 16 hours a day. But they were on set 12 hours a day. Their work ethic is unbelievable.” It’s a lesson he has learned to apply to his own craft.
“I remember years and years ago somebody asked Will Smith, ‘what is the secret to your success?’ This is way back, when he was just a rapper. And, he said, ‘When all the other rappers are in bed, I'm practicing my rapping’. Even to this day, when I’m tired and it could be 1 am, I think to myself ‘ah-ha …all the magicians and mentalists in Ireland are in bed. I’m going to go an extra two hours’. The work ethic is the main thing I’ve learned.”
- Keith Barry: Reconnected starts on Friday April 29, and visits Cork Opera House Saturday May 7 and Sunday May 8
- The Keith Barry Experience starts on RTÉ 1 on Saturday April 2 at 9.50pm
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
