A lot of auditions are not fun; they're just a necessary evil, and, if you're lucky, you have a few moments that are fun.
Everyone has dated or been with a person who is obsessed with their work, and it's immensely frustrating. You're like, "I'm right here! I'm a person! I'm interesting, too!"
Corsets do look so pretty. Once I watched it, I was like, "Well, they do look nicer than the way I do normally," but they're really uncomfortable. You start to realize why women would pass out. We had the real ones, and they were just awful. At one point, I was like, "I think that's my spleen that this is digging into." So, if I had a nightgown, that was always really comfy. I had a few coats that I thought were pretty cool.
I didn't really know much about the Houdinis when I started. As soon as they sent me the script, I wanted to find out everything I could about Bess. Luckily, I have a really wonderful friend named Michael Mitnick, who's a writer. He was a magician as a child, and that led him to the theater, which led to drama school, and he writes films now. Magic was really his thing, growing up, so he put me in touch with his magic teacher who is a real Houdini expert.
Before he died, Harry said that his wife knew everything about every trick that he did, and that she knew how they all worked. It was interesting to play with that idea, and to find the places where she really was afraid for his safety and where she was playing along. I had to find that line between what's a performance and what's real, and that's so much of what magic is, as well. It was really, really fun. They were really partners, in every sense of the word.
