'I worked with Florence Pugh on Netflix film The Wonder - and here's what I thought'

05/05/2024

He’s an award-winning magician and escapologist and now Limerick man Steve Spade has another string to his bow – coaching Hollywood A-listers, including Florence Pugh.

The entertainer told the Irish Mail on Sunday that Florence Pugh, the English actress who co-starred in Little Women with Saoirse Ronan was a ‘a pro’ when he worked with her.

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Spade coached he gifted Oscar nominee on the set of The Wonder, a Netflix movie set in Ireland in 1862 about a young girl who stops eating but remains miraculously alive and well. Pugh plays a nurse who is called in to care for the girl, who claims not to have eaten for four months.

'i worked with florence pugh on netflix film the wonder - and here's what i thought'

Spade was working on the Hollywood film Cocaine Bear at the time, when he got a call asking if he could assist in creating a way to depict a force-feeding scene with a length of tube without causing harm to the actor. The filmmakers told Spade they didn’t want to use computer-generated imagery to do it.

‘I was like, give me a week and I’ll come up with something,’ he recalls. ‘In the space of that week, I came up with a few different ways of forcefeeding someone without force-feeding someone.

Steve Spade. Pic: Supplied

‘And then I got a call from the producer, and then a call from the director, and they wanted me to talk to Florence Pugh and I pretty much had to teach her how to do it.

‘It was based on a technique that you would do for rope tricks or a rope routine, and so I taught Florence how to do it with rope and then we adapted it to the tube she used.

‘She was brilliant. She was such a pro, she just wanted to do it absolutely perfectly. She was so down-to-earth and such a lovely person. I remember doing tricks as well on set for her and some of the other cast members too and she just loved it.

‘She just wanted to be a part of everything and she wanted to know all the ins and outs and the history of what I was teaching her to be able to do this. It was a closed set, pretty much, for the scene because it was quite an intense scene.

‘It was nice to see the end product and I remember being on set and we’ve done a couple of run-throughs then they were actually recording and Sebastian, the director, turned to me and he goes: “Are you happy with that one?”

‘And I was like, I’m saying yes to like an Oscar nominee and Florence Pugh is doing it and I’m just like, “Yeah, that looks great.” You know, it’s one of those pinch-yourself moments.’

Florence Pugh on the red carpet at the Irish premiere screening of THE WONDER at the Light House Cinema in Smithfield, Dublin. Pic: Michael Chester

Spade’s special brand of magic has made him the celebrity’s go-to magician and Johnny Ward, Rob Kearney and Shane Long have all asked him to perform at their weddings.

He explains: ‘Years ago, I was the resident magician on The Daily Show with Dáithí Ó Sé and Claire Byrne. So, during that time, people started to get to know me through the TV and, in that time, I suppose, my name has started floating around a bit more.

‘And then later on, when people wanted to get married, they’d get in touch. So yeah, Shane Long, the footballer, I did his wedding in Powerscourt and I did Rob Kearney’s wedding to his wife, Jess.

‘I also did the actor Johnny Ward’s and I did Tadhg Fleming’s last year. Hilarious, the whole family. It was hard to compete with their entertainment.’

Pic: Tadgh Fleming/Instagram

Now Spade is gearing up to entertain the masses with his new show The Lost Magic, which focuses on routines that had died out when the magicians took their secrets to the grave.

‘I wondered how they would perform in the present day with technology and how things have changed and whatever, but also how to keep the traditional roots,’ he said.

‘I was writing it during the pandemic and other magicians and friends of mine kind of came in and out to give suggestions. And then the award came about, the Merlin Award, so I added in more escapes. So the whole show has changed a lot and became a kind of a mixing pot of every type of genre of magic in a one-on -one show.

‘I kind of want to produce something that hasn’t been seen before, but obviously, with my own Spade touch, or whatever that may be my own secret formula that I tried to blend into a show.’

Florence Pugh Pic: REX

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