Penn Jillette on Magicians, Intelligence and Now You See Me 2

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. Robert-Houdin thought a magician should dress like his audience, not in a conical hat and robes like a wizard or a witch. In 19th century Paris, that meant Robert-Houdin dressed in top hat and tails. Stupid magicians continued to copy his wardrobe long after audiences started wearing jeans—they missed the point.

Robert-Houdin 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. Jesse has a harder job than Robert-Houdin, Houdini or me. (I wrote that last sentence just so there would be one sentence on record where I’m included with those two geniuses.)

Movies were at least popularized and kinda-sorta invented by magicians. They were first shown as parts of magic shows, also in France. There are plenty of movies today where actors play the stupid conical-hat-and-robes kind of magicians that, within the world of the movie, have real magical powers. I don’t like any of those movies and I was so happy to find out that Jesse doesn’t like them either. Jesse is not just an actor. Jesse is an actor, a writer, a playwright and a thinker. The Now You See Me movies are fun popcorn movies, but Jesse is much more than a popcorn actor. Jesse is one of the best actors alive today and he seriously studied to play the part of magician J. Daniel Atlas. He knew the Robert-Houdin quotation and had given some serious thought to being an actor playing an actor playing a magician.

I watched Now You See Me 2 alone in a fancy screening room in Beverly Hills. The studio’s groovy young press person gave me a little speech on how the movie wasn’t quite done, there were still some special effects to finish and the sound wasn’t tweaked perfectly yet. I’ve been working with Penn & Teller doing magic professionally for 40 years and the movie sure seemed done to me. Hollywood is pickier than us real Vegas magicians. I just liked it.

I’d watched the first Now You See Me a few days before, with my family. My children are 9 and 10 and this movie was perfect for us to watch all together. It’s nice to have my children think that their magician daddy is as bright, smart and flashy as the heroes of this movie.

“Daddy, do you know how all these tricks are done?” they asked me.

“Yes” was an OK answer, right? We didn’t lie to them about Santa Claus, so I’ve bought some moral wiggle room.

I walked across the fancy crowded lobby in Santa Monica to my meeting with Mr. Eisenberg at a fancy seafood restaurant. The same groovy publicist reintroduced us. (We’d already met once before, backstage at the P&T show, while Jesse was working on the first NYSM.) I told Jesse right away that my 10-year-old daughter thought he was really cute.

“Oh, really?” he asks. “Was she raised in a Hasidic community?”

He’s not just a movie star; he’s also a comedy writer for the New Yorker. After meeting him backstage and seeing his movies, I really liked him. After two hours of conversation, I loved him.

It was a difficult interview. The problem wasn’t that we weren’t getting along or that he didn’t have things to say—we got along too well and we both had too much to say. We talked art, life, religion (or lack of religion), presidential choices (or lack of choices) and philosophy. The publicist was picking up the tab so we did talk about the movie a little. I asked Jesse if he had learned any magic for the role. He said that one my buddies, Blake Vogt, had worked with him. Blake, a great magician, has been on our TV show Penn & Teller: Fool Us. Blake said, “Working with Jesse was amazing—he was very curious when it came to magic. Whenever there was a moment of downtime, he would come over and pick my brain. It was very obvious that he cared a lot about fully wrapping his mind around what makes magicians tick.”

Thick as Thieves: The Cast of Now You See Me 2

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 at some point in their life.”

Jesse learned a little magic and a lot about magicians, maybe too much for my taste. “Because it was a sequel, I was just trying to kind of reconfigure what I had already established, but it was kind of a mixture [of several real magicians],” he explains. “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. And then, when I started to meet magicians, there was like a certain confidence that I noticed, especially for people who had started doing magic young and used it as a kind of coping mechanism for maybe some social discomfort.”

I felt like Jesse had been reading our mail. Maybe the Robert-Houdin quotation about an actor playing a part of a magician didn’t apply to his J. Daniel Atlas character. In the movie, Atlas doesn’t ever try to act like he has real magical powers.

“That’s exactly right,” says Jesse. “He says, ‘I have this incredible skill set that I’ve worked on for a long time.’ He never says, ‘I have horns and a tail and I know how to do something no one else does,’ or that ‘I have a power that no one else does.’”

I told Jesse that my friend, David Blaine, seems to feel that the audience is supposed to leave a magic performance thinking that they’ve witnessed something supernatural and not just a trick. Penn & Teller proudly do tricks; David might want the audience to think he’s really magic.

“The movie is different from David Blaine in the sense that it does not try to distort reality,” Jesse says, “and what I really love about the movie is that it celebrates intelligence and it celebrates cleverness and it celebrates hard work. Because after these magicians [in NYSM2] perform these incredible feats, they explain to their audience, and by extension they explain to the movie-going audience, how it was all done. And there’s a kind of confidence to their knowledge, rather than to their kind of righteous hidden supernatural skill set.”

The 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 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.