Legendary magician Teller explains how he helped design Mrs. Davis’ magic tricks
How do you escape from a vat of acid without getting wounded? You can’t, at least according to Teller. The famous magician, one half of the comedy magic duo Penn & Teller, was brought in to be the magic consultant on the Peacock show Mrs. Davis, and had to explain that: yeah, probably not.
“They had thought that maybe there was a way to drop somebody actually into a vat of acid and have that person go away without any injury,” Teller says. “As one who has done the bullet catch, I can tell you those life and death things are not things you mess with.”
As magic consultant on the show, Teller was asked to read the scripts for anything that was related to magic — that means correcting terminology, and making sure stage performances looked and felt right. It was Teller who pushed the show to do real sleight of hand, even when it was Young Simone revealing a card to the audience. “People who write about magic write as if magic is just special effects,” he says, bemoaning the impossible things he’s seen magic in TV and movies do.
But Mrs. Davis — with all its interrogation of reality and faith — needed to go further. “[The creators are] very conscious that they’re using a cheesy magic act that needs to feel real, as a sort of central metaphor, to tie all of these different themes of religion and stuff together. So it seemed to them — and I agree with them totally — important to take it as a level of reality that is not customarily taken in the cinema and television.”
And so Teller set about helping to design the world of magic that Simone dips in and out of as she grows up, finds God (literally), and wages a war against an AI that’s seemingly controlling the world. His vision was the magic performances would be the
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