NEW YORK — Rosamund Pike raves about the sights and the scenes while filming “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” in Budapest and Abu Dhabi. However, the actress points out one major on-set difference from past projects.
“The cast members were practicing their card tricks,” Pike, 46, recalls to USA TODAY. “Everyone’s saying, ‘Do you wanna see a trick?'”
There’s plenty of sleight of hand in the third installment of the “Now You See Me” magician-driven, thriller franchise (in theaters now). The original Four Horsemen (Jesse Eisenberg, Isla Fisher, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco) team up with a new group of Horsemen (Justice Smith, Dominic Sessa, Ariana Greenblatt) to stop a villain (Pike) from selling the world’s largest diamond to an evil entity.
“I like bringing my big villain energy to the screen,” Pike says with a laugh, calling it her “BVE.”
“It’s more fun to see someone who’s vain and full of themselves and who has put themselves on a bit of a pedestal fall down from that pedestal than it is to see someone who’s just playing it safer,” she says.
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(From left) Woody Harrelson as Merrit McKinney, Jesse Eisenberg as Daniel Atlas, Dominic Sessa as Bosco, Dave Franco as Jack Wilder, Justice Smith as Charlie, Isla Fisher as Henley Reeves, and Ariana Greenblatt as June in “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t.”
For Eisenberg, things weren’t always safe on set. The actor took part in a fight scene in a room that spins upside down. Everything in the room was padded with styrofoam, save the one bookcase where Eisenberg filmed most of his parts.
“You can see my finger is still a little bent there,” says Eisenberg, 42, holding up his right hand and pointing to his middle finger. Eisenberg thinks he fractured it, and he wore a cast for the rest of production. “It was really a lot of fun up until that exact moment.”
Fisher didn’t suffer any injuries. But the actress points out another scene where she’s stuck in a glass box that’s rapidly filling with sand, and then water. Fisher says the scene took a week to film.
“At the beginning, people asked to leave the tank to go to the bathroom,” Fisher, 49, says. “But I felt like later on, people stopped asking, which made me concerned that some people may be urinating in the water.”
Without dropping any spoilers, Fisher had good reason to be concerned. Of all the Horsemen trapped in the glass box, she spent the most time underwater.
‘Now You See Me’ cast gets a magical assist from David Blaine
Harrelson shows up to the interview with a deck of cards. He’s got a trick up his sleeve, asking costar Morgan Freeman what hand he’d want to be dealt in a game of poker. Excluding a royal flush, Freeman chooses three aces. Harrelson, who has been shuffling this deck of cards the entire time, then proceeds to deal the actor exactly what he asked for.
The surprises weren’t done: As our interview winds down, a familiar voice is heard off camera asking Harrelson to reshuffle the cards while facing the camera so that we could better see the trick. The voice is of famed illusionist David Blaine.
“You didn’t show that the cards were shuffled,” Blaine explains. “So it could seem like (Freeman) said the aces, and it was set up.”
Blaine went on to break down what he witnessed.
“What I saw happen is legitimately I swear to God, (Freeman) said three aces,” he continues. “(Harrelson) was not prepared for it. Woody was shuffling the deck and then he pulled three aces, which is an incredible thing. He actually pulled the aces out of the deck and felt them. It’s advanced sleight of hand, what he did.”
Harrelson and Blaine are friends, and the magician joined the cast at a dinner in New York that evening. The next day, those in attendance were buzzing about what happened.
“He ate a wine glass,” Smith, 30, reveals. “And then we took a photo, and he somehow changed the photo on the phone without touching it.”
Greenblatt also recalls Blaine changing the writing on a pen from “Sharpie” to the five of hearts, which was the card she picked.
All three of the new Horsemen say they appreciate magic in a new way after filming “Now You See Me 3.” But that doesn’t change how blown away they were by what Blaine did at dinner.
“What (Blaine) does is real magic,” Smith says. “That’s like actual supernatural magic. Like, he’s a wizard.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ‘Now You See Me’ cast reveals ‘supernatural’ David Blaine dinner
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