IT'S MAGIC

The cast of the new Now You See Me 2 conjures up more grand illusions— and stokes our age-old fascination with trickery.

anyone who’s ever felt tugged between the childlike wonder of the illusion and a grown-up desire for the “reveal” will enjoy

Now You See Me 2, opening June 10 and starring several cast members from the original 2013 film. After a year in exile, the magic quartet known as the Four Horsemen reunites on a globe-trotting adventure from Macau to London triggered by the new movie’s villain, played by a delightfully quirky Daniel Radcliffe.

JESSE EISENBERG, ILLUSIONIST J. DANIEL ATLAS

Eisenberg’s mom worked as a birthday-party clown alongside a magician. “I always asked him how he performed tricks, and he’d always say the same thing: ‘Can you keep a secret?’ I’d say, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘So can I!’ So he never told me anything,” Eisenberg recalls.

Working on both movies gave the actor a chance to finally peek behind the curtain, though he still relishes the illusion of a good trick. “I have two competing feelings while I’m watching magic,” he says. “One is that it’s enthralling and totally entertaining. The other is that it’s frustrating because my curiosity is killing me. But when somebody is performing a trick for me, I love being ‘lied’ to. It’s kind of a thrilling, almost childlike feeling of wonder.”

But he also loves how both the new movie and its predecessor let the audience in on the tricks in a style similar to that of Penn & Teller, the magic duo famous for revealing how their

tricks are done as part of their act. “It becomes less a celebration of showmanship and more a celebration of cleverness, craftiness, teamwork and effort. I love that, because I think what Penn & Teller do really well is reveal the underside of magic, but in a way that actually enhances magic because you realize you’ve just been watching something that was so cleverly constructed, and in that way it’s even more impressive.”

WOODY HARRELSON, HYPNOTIST MERRITT MCKINNEY

“I remember doing a magic show when I was 5 or 6,” Harrelson says, which makes him extra proud that the movie inspired his daughter, Makani, 9, to stage her own magic show for the family. “It was just so cool!” he says. “She told me, ‘That’s your best movie, Daddy.’ Not that she’s seen every movie, but she really liked it, and she started getting into magic.”

In NYSM2 Merritt is still up to his mind tricks, so much so that Harrelson’s mentor, Irish mentalist Keith Barry, claims the actor successfully hypnotized co-star Mark Ruffalo.

Not quite, Harrelson counters. “It’s an art; I can’t do it,” he confesses. But he did pick up a few card tricks and other sleights of hand from the magicians on the set while working on the movie. “I was constantly trying new stuff,” says Harrelson. “When it fails, it’s horrible. But when it succeeds, the feeling is just great.”

LIZZY CAPLAN, SCREWBALL LULA

Newcomer Caplan had to make the quirky Lula stand out in the boys’ club of the magic world. “It was really important to me not to make her just the run-of-the-mill sexy assistant or the only girl in a group of guys,” she says. She’s delighted that Lula’s overeager, slightly irritating vibe shines through onscreen.

“Throughout the shooting we had three mentor

magicians on set with us all the time either teaching us things or just wowing between takes, so we got pretty immersed in that world,” Caplan says. “I now know a handful of tricks.” And she still enjoys having her mind blown. “But after working with the three magicians on set, you realize there really is no such thing as magic—it’s purely skill, and you marvel at the skill of it all, but you do lose the illusion that there’s an actual magical element.

“That said, I think hypnotism is as close to actual magic as we can get,” she says.

DAVE FRANCO, CARD MANIPULATOR JACK WILDER

“At the end of the first movie, Jack fakes his own death,” Franco says. “So when the Horsemen plan their comeback performance in the second movie, Jack is asked to stay behind the scenes.” It’s a bitter pill for his character to swallow, Franco says. “He’s a born performer and wants to be onstage with the rest of the Horsemen.”

Franco picked up a few magi-

cal moves while working on the movie. “The best trick I learned was how to flip a card behind my back and catch it in my mouth,” he says. “I practiced this trick for more hours than I’d care to admit.”

That kind of discipline is, of course, the secret to any great illusion and making the onscreen magic believable. “It was very important to us that the tricks were things that real magicians could do,” Franco says. “Granted, we’re actors and no matter how much time we had to practice we were never going to be able to do certain tricks ourselves without the help of CGI [computer-generated imagery]. But [director] Jon Chu encouraged us to learn as many tricks as we could, and there are plenty of magic sequences where we don’t rely on special effects at all.”