Rich Sommer Quotes

I realised how much misdirection is in stunt co-coordinating. It's similar to magic, the tricks we use to make people think the stunt is real. I also have a lifelong fascination with gambling cheats. I'm not one, but I do have a fascination with it.

As a close-up magician, I was using gambling cheating techniques.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a clown. I didn't want to be an actor, I wanted to join the circus and entertain people.

He spent hours and hours and hours practising these conjuring tricks. It's just such a curious thing.

You have to learn certain skills to present magic.

I'm a big Penn & Teller fan. But I myself was never very good; I was a teenage magician who performed at kids' parties. I can still perform a vanish, credibly, and I still, in special circumstances, will make a balloon animal.

If I had auditioned for 'Merlin' on magic alone, I don't think I'd have got it. Like any kid, I probably had a magic kit, but it's not something I ever pursued. I've never watched a magic show like David Copperfield or used him to base my character on, but I really like David Blaine and Darren Brown. They are doing wonders.

I've been doing magic since I was five years old, and when I was trying to get acting gigs, I found I could make a good living at it. It's great to kind of shake the cobwebs off and get the feeling of a live audience again. I love close-up magic, the card stuff, the coin stuff, the really up-close David Blaine stuff.

I'm not a big fan of doing it because I get really frustrated because I can't do any of the tricks, but I love to watch magic.

I am a street performer as much as I am a stage performer. Yes, I have a television show, but every trick, every 'Mindfreak' you see, I can do live.

I did magic at children's parties when I was a kid.

When I see professional clowns, mimes, or people who makes ballon animals, I think of their relatives and how disappointed they must be.

I was the youngest member of the New York International Brotherhood of Magicians. It was me and a bunch of 60-year-old Jewish men.

One day, I saw a magic show, and I was like, 'I have to learn how to do this!' Every time I went to Las Vegas, I had to get at least two or three tricks from the magic shops.

Indian street magic tends to be very gory, blood and guts. One trick is for a magician to take a knife and appear to cut his kid's head almost off. The magician then says to the crowd, 'Well I can continue to cut off my son's head or you can all give me some money.' Then he wanders around and takes 10 rupees from everyone and restores his son.

If you want to talk about magic, the stuff that blows me away is the stuff that's done close up.

If people are fans of 'Mindfreak,' they are going to be so excited with 'Believe.' They are actually going to see those illusions that people think can only happen with trick photography.

You can watch actors create their illusions, but if you don't see where they get the pigeons from, you don't really know how they're doing it.

Penn and Teller love the very intellectual side of magic. Me, I'm more fun than them. They never look like they're having fun. They look angry.

When I was six years old, I fell in love with magic. For Christmas, I got a magic box and a very old book on card manipulation. Somehow, I was more interested in pure manipulation than in all the silly little tricks in the box.

I intend to do the Penn & Teller show until they pry my cheesy magic wand from my cold dead fingers.

Theft annoys me more than anything else. The purloining of effects from another magician. Some people think it's massive to steal the secrets of nuclear reactors, but to steal a card move is trivial. They're wrong.

There's something about the Houdini act that is not always made clear - about the escape act in general.

For better or worse, I have a lot of vaudeville circus skills that you just can't showcase in Aaron Sorkin's work.

Growing up, yeah, I had a magic kit with learn tricks and learn card tricks, but I was never... I used to watch whatever magic special was on as a kid, but then, it's not that I lost interest, but to be a magician, you really, it's really hard work. Learning lines is hard enough; learning sleight of hand, that's real practice.