BEN HART
CABARET
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I’m always happy to help people out with a beheading
Magician Ben Hart has a few things up his sleeve. Such as the fact he’s now the go-to guy for movie and theatre producers who need some trickery on their set. Ahead of his biggest foray on the Fringe to date, he tells Brian Donaldson that working with the ‘brilliant and kind’ Tom Cruise was a treat
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ot that he would ever be so discourteous as to say it, but Ben Hart is no longer just a Fringe magician. He’s been in and out of an Edinburgh August for a decade and is now set to play the Pleasance Grand with Wonder, following in the footsteps of Colin Cloud, another of the Festival’s masterful illusionists. ‘I’ve taken the show I was doing on tour and supercharged it for that amazing room which demands a certain special something,’ Hart says. ‘I remember looking at that room ten years ago when I first did the Fringe and thinking, “that’s the end goal of the journey”. But who knows what’s next?’ What’s next might depend on which influential producer, director or star has him on speed dial. To say that he had a recent curious encounter with Hollywood superstar Tom Cruise might be pandering to those who automatically assume that the pint-sized giant of Tinseltown has a decidedly odd streak to him. Sure, there’s the Scientology stuff for one thing and that time he jumped up and down on Oprah’s sofa
42 THE LIST FESTIVAL | 1–10 August 2022 | list.co.uk/edinburgh-festival
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proclaiming his undying love for Katie Holmes. But Hart is having none of that after spending time teaching the actor some sleight-of-hand trickery for him to use in the next Mission Impossible film. He insists that Cruise is ‘quite brilliant and passionate and precise and completely dedicated. He was very easy to talk to, and was kind and interested in the world. I think that’s true of all great makers of anything, that they need to have a curiosity of the world.’ And let’s face it: he’s spent weeks on a closed film set with him, and you and I haven’t. But still . . . ‘When I got the job, I received a phone call and they said, “can you be in a car at 6am tomorrow morning? You’ll have a rapid covid test, then stay in the car until we get the results back and then we go and meet Tom Cruise to talk about magic”. I said, “yes! I’m available!!” I mean, it sounded like the set-up for a movie.’ Ahead of preparing for Wonder, Hart had been busy helping out on other projects. For a few years now he’s been involved in When Magic Goes Wrong for Mischief Theatre, a show which was co-created with two of his heroes in magic,
