Now You See Me Star Reveals His Insane Card Skills: ‘I Can Cut a Banana in Half’

Dave Franco has spent three movies pretending to be a magician. As it turns out, at least one part of it was never pretend. The actor recently stopped by the Happy Sad Confused podcast, and when the conversation turned to Now You See Me and his card tricks, he told Josh Horowitz how he can cut a banana in half by throwing cards.

It sounds invented until you remember he has been doing this since 2013. Across the trilogy, Franco says he got good enough at throwing playing cards to slice fruit clean through. He shared, “I have gotten proficient enough at throwing cards that I will cut a banana in half. I can cut a banana half with a throwing card.”

He also knows exactly how that lands in conversation. Franco joked that people always want to know whether he does it wherever he goes. And he always had a hilarious response: “No, I don’t just carry around a deck of cards and a f**king banana. But if you got one, let’s go. Bring it up.” Here’s how he learned the trick.

Dave Franco Learned the Card Tricks from Magician David Kwong

Dave Franco in a still from Now You See Me 2 | Credits: Lionsgate Films

Dave Franco’s tricks go all the way back to the first Now You See Me film. Franco plays Jack Wilder, the youngest of the Four Horsemen and the one whose entire gimmick is sleight of hand. To sell that, the production brought in magician David Kwong to train the cast.

During a New York Post interview, Kwong said Franco was the best student he had. Franco earned it by treating card throwing like a full-time job. Franco recalled his first day on set, “Our first day of rehearsal wasn’t us dissecting the script, it was me in a room throwing cards and trying to cut a banana in half.”

The film features a sequence the filmmakers called sleight-of-hand combat, where Jack fends off Mark Ruffalo’s FBI agent using magic techniques rather than fists. Franco got good enough that the cards stopped behaving like props. He put one through a stunt coordinator’s face. He shared, “I sliced one of the stunt coordinator’s cheeks open.”

Ruffalo did not walk away clean either. Franco nicked him during the fight scene, and he wasn’t happy about it. He shared, “After 10 takes of me throwing cards at his face, he was a little over it.” Franco got to brush up on his magic skills when he appeared in the next two movies in the franchise.

Dave Franco Found New Ways to Throw Cards for Now You See Me 3

When Dave Franco appeared in Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, he already knew how to throw cards. He needed to find something new to do with them. Speaking to Variety on the carpet at the New York premiere of the movie, he explained that being good at the basics only raised the bar.

He shared, “I’m very good at throwing cards, and so I found new ways to throw cards, which sounds silly, but it’s much harder than you think.” His description of the process was blunt: “It’s me in a hotel room for a month learning a hand flourish.” He added that the flourish might be on screen for two seconds.

The cast of the movie trained under magic coaches Ben Seidman and Handsome Jack. The creative team brought in consultants from Los Angeles’ famed Magic Castle to design the illusions for the movie.

Anyone brave enough to hand Dave Franco a banana? Let us know in the comments below!