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By Root 429 0

was a huge success and after it came out Chris Nolan called me to suggest another project. We had developed a really great working relationship, so I was pleased to take on The Prestige, a movie about magicians in which I played the guy who actually makes the tricks. I was working with Christian Bale again, along with Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson. I had never met Scarlett before, but it only took about two minutes of conversation for us to become firm friends: she’s talented, clever, funny and beautiful – what more could you want? We were standing together waiting to do a scene when I suddenly realised I was looking down at her from quite a distance. ‘How tall are you?’ I asked. She gave me a funny look for a moment and said, ‘You mean, how short am I, don’t you?’ She’s five foot four and that’s her all over: gets right to the point, with no mucking about! I had a bit of a warning for her. ‘You’re going to have big sons,’ I said. ‘How do you know?’ she asked. And I said, ‘Because my mother was five foot one and my brother and I are both six feet two . . .’

The Prestige is the ultimate example of cinematic sleight of hand. You watch it, and then you lose the thread and you think, what’s going on here? Chris Nolan leads you by the nose right the way through the movie and then you discover that the whole thing is a trick. It really appealed to me, because it demanded a lot from me as an actor. Of course I’d read the script and I knew what was going to happen and where all the illusions and double meanings lay, but I had to put all that to one side. As an actor you know what’s going on, but you have to remain with the character and stay with the reality of his experience. I found it very interesting, because my character was holding the centre of the picture together: my job was to explain things (or that’s what you’re supposed to think) and that was really testing.

I’ve always been fascinated by magic, first as a little boy and later by shows in Las Vegas such as Siegfried and Roy, but I’ve never been much of a magician myself. When we were on the set of Zulu, I remember that the director, Cy Endfield, turned out to be a fantastic magician. He invented card tricks – I mean, it’s hard enough to do them, let alone invent them. He used to keep us enthralled night after night. But he never revealed his secrets. And the magicians who taught Christian and Hugh the tricks they perform in The Prestige? Well, they never really explained how they did it, either. I found it hard to learn tricks myself – both for this and for the more recent film Is Anybody There? in which I play a retired magician – because my fingers just don’t work quite as well as they used to.

From all the razzamatazz of a huge international blockbuster movie, I went back into the much quieter world of the British film industry. Well – it was quieter when I went into it, but when we released Sleuth in 2007 all hell was let loose. The picture got slammed by the critics in an almost maniacal frenzy of personal attacks on Jude Law – who played the character I had played thirty-five years previously – and its director Kenneth Branagh. I came out of it relatively unscathed, but the other two really copped it.

Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes we made with the movie was not billing it as an original work by Harold Pinter; there isn’t a single line of Anthony Shaffer’s previous script in the film. (It turned out to be Harold Pinter’s last work – which made it all the more special for me as I had been in his first play, The Room, at the Royal Court in 1960. Harold died just after the movie was released.) This Sleuth is very different from the first version. Ken was always very clear that it wasn’t a remake. It was a movie based on the plotline of Sleuth, he said, and we happened to have stolen the title, but it’s a different concept entirely. Whereas the original was set in an English country house with all those mazes, this was all minimalist marble and glass – it’s a much cooler effect. And although I’m playing the role Olivier played all those years ago opposite