Young B.C. magician set to perform in mind-bending stage show based on hit movie franchise

Vancouver magician Gabriella Lester will perform in the Now You See Me Live stage show in Sydney in December.

When your accomplishments already include breaking out of a straitjacket while suspended almost a hundred feet in the air, and your resume boasts a stint on Penn and Teller and a talk with TEDx, reaching another magician milestone of the same magnificence might seem like an impossible feat.

They say too much success too early can be a curse, but Port Moody-raised magician Gabriella Lester doesn’t know anything about that.

In December, Lester will take to the stage of the Sydney Opera House as one of the four, famed ‘Horsemen’ in Now You See Me Live. An expansion of the heist-thriller franchise, the show features four magicians skilled in stupendous card tricks, escape artistry, mind-reading, and all the other tricks of the trade that keep audiences on their toes and questioning reality.

Lester is the only woman of the four and, at just 21-years-old, she is the youngest. The opportunity to take part in a show of such scale, she says, is “massive.”

“It’s something I’ve always dreamed of doing,” says Lester, who has performed on some of Vegas’ biggest stages and is aa frequent headliner at Hollywood’s World Famous Magic Castle.

“I love the movies, I watched them growing up. I knew that this show was happening, but I never thought that I would be cast in it.”

Lester, like most people, first fell in love with the unfettered world of magic when she was given a classic kit as a child. Yet as classmates jumped from one pursuit of entertainment to another, their magic coins forever lost down the couch as dinosaurs and drawing pencils replaced decks of cards as the hobby du jour, Lester’s fascination remained steadfast.

As her obsession with the art of deception continued, she became “addicted” to carrying around a deck and would perform card tricks to anyone, anywhere she could.

“I think my parents saw the same trick a hundred times, but I absolutely loved it,” she laughs.

“I used to eat with a fork in one hand at the dinner table and be shuffling a deck of cards in the other. I used to fall asleep at night practicing and wake up to cards all over my bed, and all over the floor.”

Magic had never felt like a hobby for Lester, but more of a calling. She knew teachers and waiters that were magicians and would bump into street performers on random occasions when she was out with her family. Vancouver, she reveals, has a “big magic scene” that would rival its more commonly known flourishing industry of film.

“It just kept feeling like it was this thing that I was supposed to do,” she says.

Plus, she adds, she has always been “allergic” to the idea of a 9-5 and magic, arguably the furthest thing away from the mundanity and predictability of conventional work, seemed like the only viable career path.

Lester enrolled in education programs, some in Vancouver, others in the States, that would peel back the curtain of some of her favourite tricks and illusions. She says the straitjacket trick she has since become synonymous with is a progression of practices carried out while walking home from school, as a mere teenager.

“One day I was hanging upside down on monkey bars, dreaming of wanting to be like Harry Houdini, and six months later I was able to perform the routine, upside down at 40 feet, for the first time,” she says. It was during this time, she laughs, that she learned it “wasn’t very wise” to ring around mental hospitals, asking if they had straitjackets she could borrow.

After graduating Port Moody’s Heritage Woods Secondary Lester travelled the world, learning as much as she could from the notoriously tight-lipped industry professionals. There were “some Youtube videos,” but for the most part she gained her knowledge from the “extraordinarily generous” performers who were willing to lift the lid on the secrets.

As she reached an age where most of her peers were determining what to do with their lives, Lester was already well established within her chosen industry.

“I felt like the world was my oyster with magic from such an early age, because there was not one person that said ‘no’ to helping me, or to giving me advice,” she says.

The young magician says she feels as though she has experienced “a million ‘I’ve made it’ moments,” where every small step - like the first time performing on stage, hearing an audience applaud, or winning an award - felt like conquering a mountain.

Yet what Lester considers to be her biggest achievement to date isn’t some supernatural accomplishment or life-threatening stunt. It is educating students in programs like the ones she once took part in - one of many “side quests” of hers alongside TedEx speaking, motorcycle stunt doubling and film consulting with the likes of Disney and Hallmark - and redefining people’s perceptions of what a successful, working magician can look like.

“I think for a long time, when people thought of a magician, they thought of David Copperfield, a man dressed in a tux, or of someone doing kids parties,” she says.

“There wasn’t really a gap in between for all these different kinds of people.”

Lester says “there were a lot of exceptional magicians” that had traits that she was impressed by, and career paths that she wanted to follow, but “there wasn’t anyone who mirrored what I wanted to be like.” In the male-dominated industry of magic there was no-one who looked like her, or who performed in the way that she one day hoped to.

“Now I’m fortunate enough that I get to run these programs, I get to show these kids that you can perform in a show you once dreamed of being in, and that’s a beautiful, full circle moment for me,” she says.