Video: THE ILLUSIONISTS Talk All Things Magic

I'm Paul De Bec, I play the trickster in The Illusionist, I'm the host and MC as well as taking care of most of the comedy magic in the show

So, being an international illusionist you do end up with a lot of foreign currency

And I've found a little life hack to help you when you travel from country to country

All you do is you fold your currency up, there's a $20 bill here, once, twice, thrice, four

times and what actually happens is it starts to change, as if by magic, to a genuine £20 note

And that is a very good exchange rate, by the way. I'm James Moore, I'm the showman in The Illusionist, direct from Broadway

Just get that loaded in there. And I specialise in grand illusion as well as some intimate pieces with the audience

Hello, how are you? I'm good, worried mildly. I'm going to need your hand for this if you don't mind

Could you hold it out? Yeah. Place the cards on your hand. Now the great thing about the illusion is not only do we use magic, we use technology

as well. We're going to use both those things for this trick. Okay

In my pocket, here comes the technology part, is my phone. Could you name a number between 1 and 52

Out loud? Yes please. 47. Any particular reason why you chose 47? No

I'm going to show you this. You can see on my phone, we're going to go into my notes

Just here. Now on my notes there's a list of commonly selected cards

I'm going to scroll down, you can see they're all different. And if we go to 47, could you say out loud the name of that card

Seven of Diamonds. We'll show you guys on the camera, they're all different

Okay, Jamie, here's the moment of truth. Open up the pack of cards

and you see that there one card amongst all of them Take them out yeah And just look through them There one card in there that isn the same as the others

because it's facing the other way. Could you take that card out? I could

Turn it over. Have a look. It's a seven. Show the camera of diamonds

I'm Li-Hoji. I'm the manipulator. I'm going to make a surprise with my sleigh of hands

Alright, before starting this magic, I will make sure, Jamie, we never talked about this

trick before, right? No. Because, maybe people will doubt that we have talked about this trick before, because

it's going to be really amazing. Well, actually I need my phone and you can see my doggy pictures, so lovely, hum hum

And then I'm gonna open it and I will go to my Instagram

You can see Hojin you. Follow me. And if you go there is a lot of pictures but there is one picture which is my favorite pictures

It's the card picture you can see there. But what's more amazing is I can move this card

And then even you can check you can not do anything with this

Jamie, I'm gonna ask you one thing. Do you have your favorite card? Yeah

You can change if you want. Do you wanna keep it? No, I think I've got it

What is it? Queen of Hearts. Queen of Hearts? Queen of Hearts

That is amazing because this is Queen of Hearts. We say, wow

I was probably about it was before I even started school so I was probably about three or four years old and I seen a magician on the TV And I grabbed the blanket off the back of the couch and I used to put it around me like a cape

thinking that that's what all magicians should look like. And I would pretend to do magic and my parents would have to pretend to be amazed, even though they knew exactly what I was doing

Not a lot has changed, to be honest with you. I think eight years old, yeah. I used to be obsessed with the circus

and juggling, plate spinning, just a few simple circus skills. And I made my first trick out of a shoebox

Entered a school talent show and nobody spoke about the juggling or the plate spinning. They wanted to know how the trick was done

I think at that moment I knew that I wanted to go down the magic route. Well, when I was 8, on the way back home after the school

my friend showed me a magic trick, which is a card magic trick

But it's kind of a different card magic trick. He's producing the cards in his empty hand

And after I saw the magic, I thought, well, there's a real magician

Maybe there's a real magician, but actually it wasn't. So I was very disappointed. But at the same time, I'd be like, oh, I can be a magician if I learn this

And then I tried to learn it, and magic has become my life. Yeah, well, I've been very lucky

One of my idols actually became a friend and a mentor. It was a gentleman by the name of Wayne Dobson

who had a magic show on TV here when I was growing up

and yeah so he was an amazing comedy magic performer really put a lot of personality into his magic

and that's what I strive to do now For me it still continues to be David Copperfield

very famous in the 80s and 90s still has a show in Las Vegas now and what I love about him was not just the tricks

it was the theatre he created it was the stories he told through the performance pieces on stage

Everybody like a hero for me who working with illusionists also there is a magician whose name is Ungeli in Korea Actually when I started magic I was looking at him all the time when I was growing up

Certainly, yes, from the show that they were at the Shaftesbury a few years ago, it's an all new cast

There's a whole pool of illusionists that are drawn from for all the different tours

So there will be something new for everybody for sure. Yeah, absolutely. We just did a show in Russia and the cultural difference in Russia is that they tend to not applaud until the end of the show

So for us it was a learning experience because 20 minutes in we're getting a lack of applause and we're thinking maybe something's wrong

But that's just how they're taught and how they've grown up. Whereas Mexico, immediately straight from the off they were going crazy and they're just entertaining themselves so to speak

So yeah, depending on where we go the reaction is different from everyone. Well, I worked with him since 2013 and actually I didn't like very much

The thing is I couldn't speak any English so I couldn't have any communication with him

So I was kind of an outsider. But now we became like family

We practiced together and we developed the magic together. We worked together

Actually sometimes I think we are closer than actually family because we are spending all the time together

So we are like a real family, yeah. In five words. Five wars

A show for all ages. Entertaining, magical, extravagant, family-friendly. That's five

I agree