Released in 2006, Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige is a labyrinthine thriller about obsession, sacrifice and showmanship, with Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman locked in one of cinema’s great rivalries. Adapted from Christopher Priest’s 1995 novel of the same name, the film took six years to reach the screen and arrived sandwiched between two Nolan Batman films, almost as a magician’s sleight of hand. With David Bowie as Nikola Tesla, Michael Caine as the wise old ingénieur and a third-act reveal that has fuelled debate ever since, it’s a film that asks you to watch closely. Below, we tell the behind the scenes story with 25 facts about The Prestige.

If you want even more on the film, you can listen to our podcast on The Prestige on Spotify, YouTube, and the ATRM website.

1. Nolan beat an Oscar winner to the rights

Back in 2000, Christopher Nolan was in London hawking his low-budget breakout Memento (2000) around US distributors when he stumbled across The Prestige, a 1995 novel by British science fiction author Christopher Priest. There was just one problem: another filmmaker was already circling. Sam Mendes, fresh off the Best Picture win for American Beauty (1999), had approached Priest about adapting the book.

Nolan, at this point, had only made the micro-budget noir Following (1998). On paper, it shouldn’t have been a contest, but Priest gave him the rights anyway. He later said he chose Nolan for two reasons: he was a fan of Following, and he wanted to support a filmmaker still on the way up. Mendes, Priest reasoned, didn’t need the help.

Nolan was set to make The Prestige after Insomnia (2002), but that film led to him being offered Batman Begins (2005), and Priest was bumped to the back burner. (Last time he does anyone a favour.)

2. Two other actors were in the frame for the lead

Hugh Jackman plays Robert ‘The Great Danton’ Angier, an aristocratic showman who hides his privileged upbringing behind a stage name and whose desperation to crack his rival’s greatest trick takes him from London to Colorado and back. He’s a man undone by obsession, and Jackman wasn’t the only actor Nolan considered for the role.

Josh Hartnett, riding high after Pearl Harbor (2001) and Black Hawk Down (2001), was on Nolan’s shortlist. So, reportedly, was British actor Jude Law, though it was never confirmed which of the two leads he was up for. Nolan eventually chose Jackman, saying he had “a wonderful understanding of the interaction between a performer and a live audience.” Jackson’s co-star Christian Bale later admitted that where Jackman had years of stage experience to draw on, he himself had almost none. It’s one of the reasons the casting dynamic works so well: the showman versus the craftsman, baked in from day one.

3. Jackman almost went the other way

When the actor first heard about the film, neither lead role had been cast, and his agent told him he should push for Borden. By the time he sat down with Nolan, though, his instincts had shifted. Nolan asked which part he preferred, and Jackman said, “Actually, I think I’m better suited to Angier.”

To prepare, Jackman dug deep into the world of mid-century stage magic and modelled Angier on Channing Pollock, a wildly famous American magician of the 1950s. Watch closely and you’ll see the influence in Angier’s stage costume: the black tuxedo, white shirt and bow tie are pure Pollock.

4. There was a midnight show with with a magic circle legend

As part of his research, Jackman went to see American illusionist David Copperfield perform in Las Vegas, taking his wife along for the night. Afterwards, Copperfield met them backstage and insisted, “Come back to my place.” They got in his car expecting a quick drink. They ended up at a sex shop.

Copperfield told Jackman to push the nipple on a mannequin near the till. He did, and huge doors swung open behind it to reveal a private museum the size of four football fields, packed with magic memorabilia. It was half past midnight, and Copperfield proceeded to perform a 90-minute private show for Jackman and his wife, even demonstrating how Houdini had pulled off his famous water escape. He refused, though, to give up any of his own secrets.

5. Jackman’s co-lead chased the role

Angier’s rival, on stage and off, is Alfred ‘The Professor’ Borden, a working-class magician. He’s played by Christian Bale, who is in fact performing three roles: the twins Albert and Frederick, who pretend to be the same person, and Borden’s ingénieur, the perpetually silent Bernard Fallon.

Nolan and Bale had just finished Batman Begins the year before, but Nolan didn’t initially have Bale in mind for The Prestige. It was Bale who came after the part. He got hold of the script, fell in love with the role, and contacted Nolan directly to lobby for it. Nolan later said he had no idea how Bale had even got the script, but that he later found it impossible to imagine anyone else as Borden. Bale was also the only cast member to read Priest’s original novel, despite Nolan having explicitly told them not to.

6. The on-set magic consultant was a big name

Milton the Magician, the cheerfully retired old performer John Cutter (Michael Caine) takes Angier and Borden to see in the early scenes, is played by Ricky Jay, a real-life American magician with a near-mythical reputation for sleight of hand. Beyond his on-screen role, Jay was hired as the production’s magic consultant and personally trained Jackman and Bale in close-up technique.

You can see his influence in the small details: the way Borden moves a coin or ring across his fingers, for example, came from Ricky Jay. By all accounts, Jay was also a closed book. He’d show Bale and Jackman the start, the middle or the end of a trick, but never all three at once. One day, after weeks of training, Jackman tried to coax something simple out of him: “Hey Ricky, my kids keep asking me to do magic for them. Any chance you can show me something easy?” Jay’s reply: “No.”

7. The lack of CPR is historically accurate

One of the film’s most heartbreaking moments comes in the first act when Angier’s wife Julia drowns during a botched water tank trick, with Angier kneeling helplessly over her body once she’s pulled out. Some viewers have flagged this as a plot hole, arguing he should have at least attempted to resuscitate her. In fact, the film is being faithful to its period: cardiopulmonary resuscitation as we know it wasn’t standardised and recognised until 1960, almost a century after the events of the film.

8. The opening shots tell us everything

Watch the very first frames of The Prestige closely (which, as the film tells us constantly, is the whole point) and you’ll find Nolan has already given the entire game away. The opening shot is a slow pan across dozens of discarded top hats lying in a forest, which we later find out are cloned. The second is a pair of identical-looking birds in a cage, who Sarah’s (Rebecca Hall) nephew later refers to as brothers.

So, shot one is clones, which is Angier’s method to performing the Transporting Man trick central to the plot. Shot two is identical brothers, which is Borden’s method to performing the trick. As the images play out, Borden’s voiceover asks, “Are you watching closely?” telling us (vaguely, admittedly) that we’re watching the reveal of the secrets.

9. The director saw the film as an allegory for filmmaking

Nolan said one of the things that drew him to the source material was its setting at the turn of the 20th century, an era of huge industrial change in which scientific marvels and magical illusions still felt like neighbours. Magicians, he argued, were the rock stars and filmmakers of their day, and audiences came to their shows believing the impossible might genuinely be on offer.

That’s no idle observation, because Nolan has openly described The Prestige as an allegory for filmmaking itself. He does this kind of thing a lot. In Inception (2010), Dom Cobb’s dream team is structured exactly like a film crew (extractor, architect, forger, point man, chemist), and here, as we’ll come on to, the entire narrative is built using the structure of a magic trick. The pledge, the turn, the prestige. Try unseeing it once you know.

10. The most haunting line was an ad-lib

Late in the film, just before Sarah hangs herself, she has a final, devastating exchange with Borden in which she shouts, “I know what you are.” It’s a line that lands like a hammer because it sounds, on rewatch, like Sarah has somehow worked out that her husband is two people. In fact, she hasn’t. The line was an ad-lib by Rebecca Hall.

Hall, who was just 23 at the time and in only her second feature, said she fully expected Nolan to ask for another take and tell her to drop it. Instead, he liked the extra layer it inadvertently created and kept it in: a line written as confused grief becomes, in retrospect, the closest Sarah ever comes to seeing the truth.

11. Even the earlobes were thought through

The prosthetic work used to turn Hugh Jackman into Angier’s drunken Cockney double, Gerald Root, is some of the most underrated in any Nolan film. The job fell to make-up artist Leo Corey Castellano, who built Root a custom prosthetic nose, mouth and even prosthetic earlobes, sweating the kind of detail you’d only ever clock on a freeze frame.

The earlobes are the giveaway, in fact, to telling the difference between Angier and Root. Look closely at Angier and Root side by side and you’ll see Angier’s lobes are attached to his face, while Root’s hang free. First time round, the work is so good you can’t tell whether you’re watching Jackman or someone else entirely.

12. The Thin White Duke turned Nolan down (at first)

Nolan only ever wanted one actor to play Nikola Tesla, the visionary Serbian-American inventor whose alternating current technology underpins the film’s climactic device. The problem was that David Bowie said no. Worse, he said no twice.

Rather than recast, Nolan flew personally to meet Bowie and pitch him on the role face to face. He told the pop music icon that no one else could play the part, and admitted later “I would say I begged him.” It’s the only time in Nolan’s career he has gone back to an actor who initially passed, and you can see why he held the line. Bowie is the right age, plays creative weirdness like nobody else, and arrives in Colorado looking exactly like a man who might or might not be plugged into the cosmos.

13. Victorian London was built in a garage

The production design across The Prestige is staggering, and the man behind it is Nathan Crowley, Nolan’s long-time design collaborator. For the film, Crowley and his team scouted around 70 locations in Los Angeles to double for turn-of-the-century London. Some shooting also took place in Colorado, and a section of the Universal backlot was redressed into four or five streets of Victorian London. Only one full interior set was built from scratch: the underground space we see beneath the stage at the start and end of the film.

Most impressive of all is how Crowley got started. Nolan wanted to be able to visualise the film while he was writing the script with his brother Jonathan, so he had Crowley begin designing sets in his own garage during pre-production. The pair had done exactly the same thing on Batman Begins, with Crowley building a model of Gotham as the script took shape. Must have a pretty large garage, that man.

14. The Tesla and Edison rivalry runs through the film

Sitting just behind the Angier-Borden feud is a second, real-world rivalry: that between Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, whose battle over alternating versus direct current shaped late 19th-century electrical engineering. Watch carefully and the film keeps nodding to it. Tesla’s assistant Alley demonstrates the alternating current system to a London crowd, and a heckler immediately starts shouting that the machine isn’t safe. Later, when Angier reaches Colorado, the hotel manager mentions Edison’s men have been sniffing around. Step outside and there he is: the same heckler, now revealed to have been working for Edison the entire time.

Rivalry is the engine of the whole film. Angier versus Borden, Sarah and Olivia for Borden’s affections, Tesla and Edison for the future of electricity. And it’s in this thread that Bowie gets one of the film’s most affecting lines. When Angier insists money is no object, Tesla pauses and replies, “Perhaps not. But have you considered the cost?”

15. The novel is even darker than the film

Christopher Priest’s 1995 source novel and Nolan’s film share a skeleton, but the bones are arranged very differently. In the book, the rivalry between Borden and Angier ignites when Borden bursts into a séance Angier is hosting and exposes it as a fraud. In the resulting scuffle, Julia is thrown to the ground and miscarries their child. Séances were a genuine craze in late Victorian England, so the setting fits, but a miscarriage is perhaps an even grimmer inciting incident than the film’s drowning sequence.

The other big shift is the nature of Tesla’s machine. In the film, the device appears to duplicate a person exactly as they are at the moment of activation and transports them a few hundred metres away. In the novel, it transports the person’s ‘essence’ into a freshly created body, leaving the original behind as a dead husk.

16. Borden never frames Angier in the book

One of the film’s pivotal twists is that Borden is set up by Angier, framed for a murder he didn’t commit. In the novel, that doesn’t happen. Instead, Borden actively sabotages Angier’s teleportation act, and the consequences are nightmarish.

The interference creates two Angiers simultaneously. One is desperately ill, having had half of his ‘essence’ siphoned out by the malfunctioning machine. The other is a half-spectral figure who has to physically concentrate to remain solid in the world.

17. The film borrowed real Tesla history

Nolan has said that he did very little research into how stage magicians actually pulled off their tricks, preferring to invent most of the on-screen illusions himself. The Tesla material, on the other hand, was rooted in the real thing. The Serbian-American inventor genuinely did conduct experiments at Colorado Springs, and one of his real-world projects was a device called the Magnifying Transmitter, designed to transport electrical energy wirelessly across distance.

That machine is the direct inspiration for the cloning device Tesla builds for Angier in the film. Read up on Tesla and you’ll find a man whose actual inventions, theories and obsessions are arguably stranger than anything fiction has thrown at him. (We won’t go down that rabbit hole now, but trust us: the deeper you go, the better it gets.)

18. Two famous magicians get cameo references

The vanishing bird cage trick Angier performs early in his career has a real-world pedigree. It was the trademark of Harry Blackstone, a hugely popular American stage magician known as ‘The Great Blackstone,’ and was later carried on by his son, Harry Blackstone Jr. Blackstone Jr also held the record for pulling 80,000 rabbits from his sleeve (we’re assuming that figure is a career total rather than a single show.)

There’s a more obscure nod tucked into the bullet-catching scene as well. Just before Angier shoots Borden, the camera catches a list of acts on the bill behind Borden, and one of the names is Harry Dresden, a fictional Chicago wizard and private investigator from American author Jim Butcher’s long-running fantasy book series The Dresden Files.

19. Chung Ling Soo was a real magician with a tragic ending

The elderly Chinese magician Angier and Borden go to see at the start of the film, Chung Ling Soo, was based on a real performer, though the truth behind him is even stranger than the film suggests. His real name was William Ellsworth Robinson, and he was a white American who, for the entirety of his career, performed under the moniker Chung Ling Soo in elaborate Chinese costume and refused to speak any English in public.

Robinson reportedly had a long-running rivalry with an actual Chinese magician named Ching Ling Foo, and his career ended in tragedy when a bullet-catch trick went horribly wrong on stage. His final words, in a perfect collision of life and act, were apparently, “My God, I’ve been shot.” That really is total devotion to the craft.

20. The lead’s initials spell out a magic word

Alfred Borden and Robert Angier share more than a stage rivalry. Their initials, A and B and R and A, spell out ‘ABRA,’ as in abracadabra. In a film and source material this committed to symmetry and misdirection, that is unlikely to be a coincidence.

There’s a related Easter egg only the novel makes explicit. The Borden twins do, in fact, have separate first names. Sarah’s Borden is called Albert, and Olivia’s Borden is called Frederick. When they merged into a single public identity, they smashed the two names together into ‘Alfred.’ It’s why Olivia keeps calling Borden “Freddy.”

21. The score followed the structure of the trick

The film’s composer was British musician David Julyan, who had been with Nolan from the very beginning. Julyan had scored Nolan’s two student short films, then Following, Memento, Insomnia and now The Prestige. His score here mirrors the film’s architecture beautifully, divided into three movements titled “The Pledge,” “The Turn” and “The Prestige.” It’s a lovely bit of design, though it might also tell you something that Nolan ultimately chose to play “Analyse” by English rock band Radiohead’s frontman Thom Yorke over the end credits, rather than Julyan’s score.

The Prestige turned out to be Julyan’s last feature with Nolan. The year before, on Batman Begins, Nolan had collaborated with German composer Hans Zimmer for the first time, and once you’ve heard a Zimmer score booming under your superhero movie, there’s really no going back.

22. They shot almost all of the film handheld

Another long-time Nolan collaborator on board was cinematographer Wally Pfister, who had shot Memento, Insomnia and Batman Begins for Nolan. The pair’s working relationship by this point was deep, and Pfister has spoken about how it shaped the film’s visual approach.

Around 90% of The Prestige was filmed handheld, with the crew opting not to give actors traditional marks to hit on set. Pfister explained that this was a deliberate choice driven by Nolan’s desire for a naturalistic, observational feel. He wanted the camera free to move with the performances rather than locking everything to a pre-rehearsed geometry, and he wanted to be able to block scenes loosely on the day. For a period film as visually composed as this one, the fact that it was shot so loosely is a trick of its own.

23. The colour palette was deliberately muted

Costume designer Joan Bergin worked closely with Pfister to build the film’s wardrobe around a tightly controlled colour palette. Pfister and Nolan had decided early on that they wanted the costumes muted, washed back into the world, so that the actors’ faces would remain the brightest, most readable thing in any given frame.

It’s a discipline that genuinely limits what a costume designer can do, since half the toolkit (vivid hues, contrasts, statement colour) is suddenly off the table. But you’d never know it from the finished film, which is one of the most beautifully dressed Nolan productions. (Our only real complaint is that David Bowie doesn’t sport an orange mullet at any point. Otherwise, faultless.)

24. Bergin dressed for the modern eye

The costume designer has said Nolan gave her one specific instruction that broke from strict period accuracy: to design with one eye on contemporary fashion, so the costumes would feel of a piece with the film’s modern shooting style rather than feeling like a museum exhibit. You can see that brief most clearly in Olivia’s wardrobe, where Scarlett Johansson wears skirts that sit above the knee at points. If a woman had walked into a Victorian London theatre dressed like that, she’d have been escorted out before the curtain went up. On screen, of course, it works. (Then again, you could put Scarlett Johansson in a bin liner and she’d look great.)

25. The film turned a profit, and earned two Oscar nods

Released in October 2006, The Prestige didn’t exactly set the world on fire, but it more than held its own. Built on a budget of $40 million, it grossed $109.7 million worldwide, comfortably making a profit during a period in which Nolan was not quite yet the name he would become.

The film holds a 76% critics’ score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, a 92% audience score, and a hefty 8.5 out of 10 on IMDb. At the Oscars, it picked up two nominations: Wally Pfister for Best Cinematography, and Nathan Crowley with set decorator Julie Ochipinti for Best Art Direction. Both feel deserved, and on a film as ambitious as this one, both feel about right.

And there you have it: 25 magical facts about The Prestige, one of Christopher Nolan’s most rewatchable, rewarding films and arguably the cleverest magic trick he’s ever pulled off. Please share on your social media channels, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for lots of great video content.