A Couple of MADICIANS

Sitting Around Talking

Jesse Eisenberg is an actor playing an actor playing a magician. By magician Penn Jillette

The most famous magician of 21st century America is Harry Houdini, and he’s been dead for almost 100 years. Houdini named himself after Robert-Houdin, the 19th century French magician who said that a magician was an actor playing the part of a magician. So Jesse Eisenberg, in Now You See Me and Now

You See Me 2, is an actor playing the part of an actor playing the part of a magician. When we met, he knew the Robert-Houdin quotation and had given some serious thought to being an actor playing an actor playing a magician.

To do this, Jesse learned some tricks and did them for friends, but tricking people made him really uncomfortable—he doesn’t have the gloating joy of “gotcha” that some magicians have. Right after performing a trick, he’d invariably tell his friends how it was done. “I have such a guilt complex with lying to somebody,” he says. “But I always had an interest in magic because I’m a curious person. And there’s probably no curious person on earth who’s not interested in magic.”

Jesse learned a little magic and a lot about magicians, maybe too much for my taste. “My character as conceived in the first movie was supposed to be kind of a David Blaine magician in the sense that he did magic for people on the street, and was seen as really cool,” Jesse says. “And then, when I started to meet magicians, there was like a certain confidence that I noticed, especially in people who had started doing magic young as a kind of coping mechanism for maybe some social discomfort.” I felt like Jesse had been reading our mail.

His Daniel Atlas character says in the movies that a magician has to be the smartest person in the room. I earn my living as a professional magician, but I wasn’t sure I was even the smartest person at our table. Jesse as Daniel Atlas in the Now You See

Me movies is my kind of magician: a brilliant, thoughtful actor playing the part of a magician, who’s really just a smart guy doing tricks.

Magician, actor and author Penn Jillette has been performing with his show-business partner Teller in Penn & Teller since the 1970s.