20 Things You Didn't Know About The Prestige

3. Christian Bale Didn't Learn A Single Magic Trick During The Shoot

The Prestige
Warner Bros.

One of the actors who the aforementioned Ricky Jay worked with was Christian Bale, with Jay helping him with certain parts of the tricks he needed to perform on camera.

It must have been awesome to have a skilled magician like that in his corner, right? Well, not really. According to Bale, he didn't learn a whole lot of magic at all.

Reflecting on his time spent shooting The Prestige, Bale went into detail about the relationship he had with Jay, stating that the magician was such an ardent professional that he didn't want to give away any major tricks of the trade:

"They would show me the beginning [of a trick], they would show me the end, or they would show me the middle, but they would never show me all three. [laughs] I came out of the whole thing having no clue how to perform any magic trick at all."

Conversely, Bale also stated that Hugh Jackman worked with some magicians who were much more liberal with the information they dished out. Lucky sod.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!