Psychic friend
This New Yorker will make you believe in magic by looking inside your head
Adozen years ago, when Oz Pearlman worked in information technology for Merrill Lynch, he supplemented his Wall Street wages by doing magic tricks. Watching Pearlman turn five $1 bills into five $100 bills at a corporate event made then-chief financial officer James Gorman’s jaw drop.
“What the hell are you doing working here, mate?” the Aussie executive wondered.
A couple of months later, Pearlman turned to magic full time, ratcheting up his evolution from sleight of hand to sleight of mind. These days, the 35-year-old mentalist specializes in freaking out celebrities — bending a spoon for Larry David, guessing Olivia Wilde’s favorite vacation and shocking Heidi Klum by doing a card trick without cards. Now, the onetime third-place “America’s Got Talent” contestant’s taking his show, “Truth Be Told: An Evening of Mind Reading & Mentalism With Oz Pearlman,” to the iPic Theater for two nights.
“I’m still doing magic, but without the props,” Pearlman tells The Post. “You learn to finesse people’s thoughts, and it becomes a more pure form.”
Born in Israel and raised in Michigan, where his engineer father moved the family when Oz (pronounced Oh-z) was 3, he saw his first magician at 13, on a cruise ship.
“He did a trick with sponge balls and I was hooked,” recalls Pearlman, who lives in Tribeca with his wife and their 1-yearold son. He studied books and videos and noticed that certain cues drew predictable responses.
When he asked women which card they liked, “the answer would often be seven of hearts or queen of hearts because they seem to have emotional attachments; seven is a lucky number and queen, well, that’s obvious. Men commonly choose the ace of spades, which is the most iconic card . . . People are predictable in their unpredictability.”
On “America’s Got Talent,” he asked Klum to think of one card from an imaginary deck of cards as he plucked the real one from his sleeve.
Another time, after appearing on the same “Today” show broadcast as Matt Damon, the mentalist caught up with the actor as he was leaving the studio.
“He had 30 seconds [to spare] and I told him to think of anything emotional-based,” says Pearlman, who was already prepared with a piece of paper and a pen. “I wrote 729, and he said, ‘July 29.’ He’s looking at me, his security is looking at me and one of them says, ‘We have to get out of here but what the hell just happened?’ ”
Now and then, concedes Pearlman, who also runs marathons, his powers fail him. But even then, he says, he’s nimble enough to keep from looking like a fool.
“A lot of times, when I get it wrong, you won’t know it,” Pearlman says. He claims his mind-reading gambits unfold like short films: “You don’t know where the movie ends, but I do.”
Oz Pearlman performs Friday and Nov. 3 at 7:30 and 10:15 p.m., at iPic Theater, 11 Fulton St., iPic.com. Tickets are $99.
mkaplan@nypost.com