KCL student holds strangers’ hands in new prank video

King’s final year Julius Dein has been up to his usual tricks again, pranking unsuspecting Londoners. 

Having already tested the honesty of Londoners and exposed the pretentiousness of the fashion industry, Julius headed to Brixton with one simple aim: to hold as many strangers’ hands as possible.

We caught up with Julius.to get the low-down on the new video. He said: “The thing about hand-holding is that it’s just so innocuous and light hearted.

“So I just went around doing this – whether they were young, old, girl or guy”.

Friends?

In the video, which has already been viewed over 6,000 times in just four days, there are some mixed reactions – varying from the confused and polite to one man telling him “I will hold your face if you want me to, and I’ll rip it.”

Julius said: “Obviously when you go into any area and do something a bit different like this you are going to get some interesting reactions – especially in a place such as Brixton.

“The reactions I got on the whole, however, were generally very positive (especially when they saw the camera).

“Without giving too much away, you will see at the end of the video some of the reactions were genuinely interesting and inspiring.”

Being on the end of some of those mixed reactions is nothing new for Julius though, as in his latest slew of videos he has been going round some of London’s roughest estates and performing magic tricks.

He said: “The general theme of all these videos is to push Londoners outside their comfort zones.

“Many people in London just keep themselves to themselves and don’t regard the world around them. I’m just trying to disrupt that.”

The videos have obviously struck a chord with people, as after just a few videos Julius has been interviewed by the Evening Standard and Russia Today.

On his newfound fame, he said: “Getting this sort of reaction really motivates me to do more videos of this kind.

“It shows me that I’m touching a social nerve with these social experiments.”

So what’s next for Julius then? He said: “Really I am just going to keep making these videos, in the short term aiming to get that one viral hit. If, say, it gets shared by one of the top pages with some serious audience influence.”

And his next video? Julius remained tight-lipped, but let slip to us that it “will involve Tinder in a hilarious way”.

We can’t wait.