Canadian illusionist Darcy Oake plays magic trick on CBC's Andrew Chang - Action News
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Canadian illusionist Darcy Oake plays magic trick on CBC's Andrew Chang

Forget the old-school kid's birthday party type of magic tricks; Canadian illusionist Darcy Oake wants to bring back large-scale, theatrical shows.

Oake wants to bring back vaudeville style of magic theatre

Magic tricks in the CBC Vancouver newsroom

9 years ago
Duration 1:38
Canadian illusionist Darcy Oake shows CBC's Andrew Chang a magic trick

Forget the old-school kid's birthday party type of magic tricks;Canadian illusionistDarcy Oake wants to bring back large-scale, theatrical shows.

Oake'scareer took offwhen snarky Britain's Got Talent judge Simon Cowell called him"the best magician we've ever had on the show."

Within days, his audition video went viraland has now garnered more than 58 million views on YouTube.

But it hasn't been easy for Oake.

"For the longest time, I was struggling to have people see my vision and what I knew magic could be," he said.

"I'm trying to bring it back to the vaudevillian days and revitalize and bring it back into today's culture."

But while he's trying to go back to the golden era of magic theatrics, Oake says he likes the fact that magic is more accessible now to people who want to unveil the mystery.

"If anything, it's good for the art form," he says. "It makes you think outside the box, knowing that people will go back and watch it in slow motion."

Oake credits his father, well-known CBC sports broadcaster Scott Oake, for sparking his interest in magic.

One day when he was younger, his father told Oake to pick a card andput it back in the deck. He thenreshuffled the deck and promised to pull out the one Oakehad picked.

"He reached in and without looking pulls out one card, and boom,it's my card. It blew my mind away," Oake said. "I begged him for weeks to tell me how he did it, and eventually I found out it was literally a one in 52 chancefluke."

"He let me believe that he knew how to do that and it got me started on this never-ending journey to learn magic."