Lizzy Caplan Takes A Stand For Women In Now You See Me 2

There were a lot of reasons why she was drawn to the role alongside Jesse Eisenberg, Mark Ruffalo, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco and Daniel Radcliffe, plus Morgan Freeman and Michael Caine. "I admired all of these actors," she says. "And being offered the opportunity to go shoot a film of this calibre in London and China with people I respect so much was a dream come true. I've never made a movie like this!"

She particularly enjoyed the fact that the thrilling elements are continuously undermined by humour, so the film is very funny without being "a straight-up comedy," she says. "And they gave me so much free reign to improvise and make the character as strange and odd as I wanted, and not the two-dimensional token female role. I felt more freedom on this than I have with a lot of comedies I've done."

The trick was to find real-life female magicians to talk to beforehand. "There are so few of them," Caplan says. "Not only are their numbers small, but the vast majority of them have to incorporate this overly sexualized thing, which is really strange. So they're in particularly skimpy outfits and they have, like, sex-themed magic shows. I saw this one girl, she's the snake babe and she just has snakes, and she's kind of seductive with the snake. It's really pretty obvious that the imagery is on the nose. I watched her do a podcast, and they asked her what her snake was named, and the snake's name was Fellatio. I was like, 'Come on, girl!' It was a little ridiculous."

Actually, Caplan believes that women make unusually good magicians if given the chance. "If you dig a little into why there aren't many female magicians, it's interesting," she says. "You can look back into deep history when it's like, if you did anything like magic you would be burned at the stake! I think with a lot of things - comedy as well - women haven't been given the opportunity to do it, and we haven't been rewarded in the same way men have."

And she says that she definitely caught the magic bug. "I got to cut off body parts, really gross people out," she laughs. "I had a blast doing it, and anytime I tried to push it further, they always let me."

Watch the trailer for Now You See Me 2:

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