Brooke Burke on Her Magic New Role With Penn & Teller on ‘Fool Us’ (VIDEO)
It’s easy to see how much Brooke Burke enjoys her new role hosting Penn & Teller: Fool Us, just by the way she talks about magic and the show.
She’s “so excited,” she tells TV Insider in the video above of her new, “no-brainer” job. “I love live audiences. I genuinely love magic. Penn and Teller, iconic. I’m absolutely in love with the boys. We had such a great time.”
For Burke, “It’s about wonder and uncertainty and confusion and magical moments… It was like being a little girl and going to watch a show day after day.” In fact, she “had more fun” than she had expected she would.
Burke had history with Penn Jillette, having done a show together for Operation Smile in the past. “We really hit it off. I think we have great chemistry,” she says of working with the duo. “Teller is just so sweet. They’re so talented. They welcomed me to a new show, and I know how challenging that can be to come into an existing machine.”
Among the things she learned being on the magic show, in addition to the tricks, was the particulars and “mystery” of the dialogue. “There’s like a secret language that magicians speak. So as Penn and Teller are trying to figure out each particular trick to see if the world’s greatest magicians actually fooled them, they’re speaking to other magicians in code, using words and references that make no sense to the audience and certainly didn’t make any sense to me,” she explains.
While her daughter, who was on the production with her, wanted to know the secrets of the tricks, Burke was much happier staying in the dark. “I love magic so much that I didn’t want to know,” says the host. “It’s a tricky way of producing a television show on magic without blowing it for the audience, and I think they did that really well.”
And Burke was definitely a participant on the show. “I did all kinds of things, from having things shot at me [near] my face, wearing a hard hat, having a magician that I don’t know levitate me over a table. Things break. They shatter.” She even performed a trick for Penn and Teller!
Watch the full video above for much more, including memorable tricks she saw, working and participating in tricks with Penn and Teller, and whether Teller speaks off-camera.
Penn & Teller: Fool Us, Season 10 Premiere, Friday, October 27, 8/7c, The CW
