Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was a cinematic event this summer, and one of the more memorable characters from the almost-three-hour film is
Samantha Morton, who plays Circe, a woman whose cooking could be described as transformative (if you’ve seen the movie, you know what I mean).
Morton, whose other credits include Minority Report and The Serpent Queen, sat down with Entertainment Weekly to promote the film. During that discussion she shared that she was a magician’s assistant as a teenager.
She met a magician back when she was part of Nottingham’s Central Junior Television Workshop, a youth drama group now known as the Television Workshop. (That magician is unnamed in the article, but this encounter took place about 35 years ago and he was a member of the Television Workshop as well as The Magic Circle; if any readers think they know who this magician is, please let us know!)
The magician was in need of an assistant, and Morton took on the role. “I would be a plant in the audience and then would feign innocence and go up and do these amazing things,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “The one thing he taught me that I was so proud of was the Pendragon trick.”
The “Pendragon trick” she’s referencing is Metamorphosis. Morton said she was a dancer and gymnast as a little kid, but a car accident when she was 12 sidelined that path. She still had the “contortionist skills,” however, to be a successful magician’s assistant.
Morton said she retired as an assistant when she was 16. She admitted she was a little miffed, however, that her experience didn’t help her land a part in another Nolan film. “I remember years ago when he was making The Prestige and wanting an audition so badly for that movie,” she recalled. “I’m saying to my agent, ‘But I was a magician’s assistant for real!’”