Superstar magician Criss Angel has a freaky-fit body to go with his mind-blowing illusions.
Magician Criss Angel gets in the shape of his life for the show of his life. (And those supershredded abs? They’re no illusion.)
If you’re going to hang from a helicopter by fishhooks inserted in your body, you’d better be in good shape; your life depends on it.
Criss Angel has done that and more in his hit A&E reality series “Criss Angel: Mindfreak,” which begins its fourth season this June. But he’s more than a magic man. One look at his six-pack abs as he’s run over by a steamroller (while laying on a pile of broken glass!) makes that clear. Call him what he is: A professional athlete who deals not in knockouts or touchdowns, but in illusions and feats of endurance.
“It’s all about the whole package: mind, body and spirit,” Angel says of his exercise routine. “When I’m working out, I visualize what I want to look like. I’m mentally seeing my muscle grow.”
And what Criss Angel imagines…well, it usually materializes. Kinda like you-know-what.
/// Magic That Doesn’t Suck
Not long ago, the word “magician” conjured up…well, cheese. Whether it was performed by a seedy guy with a cage of doves and a showgirl assistant, or a trippy hippie with rainbow suspenders and a gummy smile, magic was something for birthday parties and cruise ships.
Criss Angel, along with other performers like Penn & Teller, changed that. He was more likely to perform in a hoodie and jeans than in top hat and tails, and his blend of illusion and feats of endurance made magic more relevant to a younger audience who preferred Korn to corn. His goth-grunge wardrobe — think Marilyn Manson on casual Friday — became a signature look. Other magicians may have appeared on “Oprah” and “Letterman,” but Angel is the only one to have introduced Ozzy Osbourne on the VH1 Rock Honors Awards.
This year promises to be Angel’s biggest one yet. The fourth season of “Criss Angel: Mindfreak” premieres this month on A&E, and he’s set to star in a new Cirque du Soleil production that opens at Las Vegas’ Luxor Resort & Casino in September. It’ll be the sixth Vegas-based company of the famed French-Canadian circus, but the first to be built around a single headliner, which is reflected in the show’s title: “Criss Angel’s Believe.”
Even by Sin City standards, the “Cirque du Criss” is a historic deal: Angel will be at the Luxor for 10 years — 10 live shows a week, 46 weeks a year — and right now he’s getting in shape for the gig of his life.
“I’m training six days a week for two hours a session,” Angel told us. “I have a contract for 4,600 performances, and I’m not going to be wearing much clothing. I don’t want people to puke. Or leave!”
Growing up in Long Island, N.Y., one of several boys in a large Greek family, Angel’s younger years put the lie to the stereotype of magicians as pasty, lonely kids fiddling about with hats and rabbits.
“I was playing baseball and football by the time I was 6, along with the drums. Yeah, and the accordion,” he adds, laughing. “Me and my brothers were all very active, and my dad kept us all busy and out of trouble. I studied martial arts and boxed with him in the backyard. He was an athletic guy himself — in the Golden Gloves and an all-state wrestler. But it was never just about the game. For him, it was the whole mind-set…getting it into your brain that you could do anything if you worked hard and put your mind to it.”
/// Freaking People Out Since Childhood
Angel put his mind and muscle to magic and spectacle at an early age, performing at parties and events in his teenage years. But he already had bigger things in mind. By the age of 18, he had obtained a pyrotechnic license, and was beginning to fuse his interests — rock music, martial arts, dance and spectacle — into his magic act. In 1994, he had his first television special, which led to a performance at Madison Square Garden and his own off-Broadway show. It ran for 600 performances and cemented his reputation as a magician to watch. Still, that was nothing compared to the rigors of preparing for a mega-show in Vegas.
Until now, he’s stayed in shape mostly without a trainer, though Angel will be working with a Cirque trainer in preparation for the new stage show. “I am more effective when I’m by myself,” he says. “A lot of these illusions require my body to do things that the human body is not designed to do. I could easily be in a situation where I could be seriously injured, so I take more of a scientific point of view to working out, building up those areas.”
Aerobics? “Right now I do 30–45 minutes a day of cardio, but I’ll take that out when I start performing. I’ll be doing what amounts to 90 minutes of cardio onstage twice a day.”
Angel’s diet is a classic high-protein, low-carb plan without a lot of measuring or fuss, heavy on lean meats like chicken and turkey. “If I’m going to eat nuts, I’ll pick something healthy like almonds. I love soda, but I don’t drink it, so I drink a lot of carbonated water instead. Once a week I eat whatever I want.”
And his approach to supplements is equally simple: nothing more than a multivitamin with some extra C. “I used to take a lot of stuff — whey protein, creatine, fat burners,” he says. “I got really strong, but the wear and tear on my muscles and joints gave me injuries.” He stopped after blowing out his shoulder during a series of bench presses. “I weighed 164 pounds and I was lifting 350, but my body didn’t really build to that strength.”
Angel also doesn’t practice yoga or meditation, but relies on what he calls “my own innate meditative state.”
“If I’m going to be underwater for 24 hours, I do have to meditate, in a way. And hanging from a helicopter with my body suspended by fishhooks — believe me, the pain that creates is second to none. I have to allow myself to get to that place when the pain doesn’t matter…and that means achieving a relaxed, meditative state.”
Like other performers who’ve committed to long-term Vegas gigs, Angel says the chance to be off the touring circuit, letting the audiences come to him, is “a relief, frankly.” Staying in shape on the road, he says, is the hardest thing of all.
“You’re at the mercy of wherever you are and whoever you’re with. Training is difficult, when some of these hotels don’t even have free weights. So I’d do calisthenics between two chairs, sit-ups with my feet hooked under the bed, push-ups, crunches…whatever time would allow me to do.”
The Vegas climate isn’t exactly conducive to outdoor exercise, so the Luxor (where Angel now lives as well as works) built him a gym. “I’ve been fortunate,” he says. “There’s not much I can do about the weather, and I can’t even take a walk along the Strip anymore, for obvious reasons. When we were taping the [A&E] show, I’d be working and jogging outside, and it was 110 degrees. Now I run indoors.”
So he’s a big sports fan? Yes and no. “I hate watching sports,” Angel says. “Your readers are gonna be pissed off that I said that, but it’s true. I’d much rather go the park and play football than sit around and watch football on TV. Well, except for the Super Bowl. I just had ‘Rampage’ Jackson, the UFC light-heavyweight champion, on my [A&E] show, and I was punching the bag with him and arm wrestling. I hit the bag harder, but he beat me in arm wrestling.”
He laughs. “As you can tell, I’m very, very competitive.”
/// The “Postmodern Houdini”
Angel is circumspect about his personal life, but tidbits crop up in the tabloids every once in a while: a divorce, rumors of relationships (Cameron Diaz, Minnie Driver), and even brushes with some familiar femmes, including Paris and Lindsay, whom he calls “friends.”
Angel worked with Britney Spears on an illusion performance for her ill-fated comeback at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards, but their collaboration never came together. He told CNN’s Larry King, “Everybody loved what we came up with, but it required a tremendous amount of work and dedication that Britney decided to not want to put forth and do something that she felt would be better suited for her.” (And we all saw the result.)
Today all he’ll say is, “Face it, in Vegas, I could go to a club or party every night of the week, but I’ve pulled away from that.”
It’s hard to imagine when he’d have time. Despite the occasional headlines, Angel, who’s been dubbed the “postmodern Houdini,” seems more an entertainer-entrepreneur than a party guy; he seems happiest when he’s working. His first book Mindfreak: Secret Revelations (HarperEntertainment) made the Los Angeles Times bestseller list in 2007 and has just been reissued in paperback. He was a judge on last year’s short-lived reality show “Paranormal” (a sort of “Psychic Idol”) and has released several CDs of original music under his own name and that of his old band, Angeldust. “I have so many other ventures going on that my live show is just one aspect of what I do now,” he says. “Television shows, original merchandise, all kinds of different ventures. And I’m involved heavily with all of it; I’m a real anal, hands-on person.”
You’ve probably seen the videos on your computer; clips from “Mindfreak” are Internet staples, and there are dozens of them, perfect for perplexing or freaking out your co-workers.
Angel’s “walking on water” illusion (shot at a Vegas hotel pool) has been viewed on YouTube 13 million times, but the one where he seems to pull a woman in two in a park is the one that always gets a crowd gasping, screaming, laughing…or retching, particularly when her torso goes hopping away. In jittery reality-show fashion, the cameras spend as much time catching the reactions of spectators as it does Angel’s illusions, which range from close-up magic to special-effects spectaculars (“levitating” through the lobby of the Luxor). When we talked, he’d just completed shooting season four of “Mindfreak,” and, with characteristic showmanship, proclaimed it “the best one yet.”
Angel says that he’ll be walking on water again, but bigger and better this time. “I wanted to walk on a lake with no controlled environment,” he says, “that’s what I’m going to attempt: to walk on Lake Mead. I plan to go out a couple hundred feet in full view of the public. It’s a place I’ll have no control over; there’ll be people on the beach and in the water, and they’ll have cell phones to shoot from every angle.”
He’s less forthcoming about the mindfreaks he’s planning for “Criss Angel’s Believe” with Cirque du Soleil, saying, “If I told you, I’d disappear.”
An Angel in Vegas
Wven by Las Vegas’ larger-than-life standards, Criss Angel’s new stage spectacular, “Criss Angel’s Believe,” at the Luxor Resort & Casino, promises to be something truly spectacular. Produced by the famed Cirque du Soleil, the production’s price tag is in blockbuster-movie territory: $100 million, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. It opens in September, with previews throughout this summer.
“Am I making insane money for this? Yeah,” Angel told Muscle & Body, just as rehearsals were about to begin. “But I really care about creating art, and this is giving me an opportunity to do something that’s never been done before.”
Like what, exactly? “For years, magicians have approached their audience with the attitude, ‘I’m smarter than you are.’ I don’t give a s--t about that,” he says. “I care about how the public feels when they watch it. We’re going to be reinventing the magic of emotion.”
With this engagement, Angel has jumped into the forefront of Vegas performing deals, joining the ranks of performers like Celine Dion, Elton John and Bette Midler. But his commitment is actually larger than any of theirs. Midler, for instance, opened at Caesars Palace in early 2008 on a two-year contract that calls for the star to perform approximately 100 shows per year.
Angel’s contract? Ten years, with two shows per night, for a total of 4,600 performances, a commitment nearly unheard-of in modern theater. (In comparison, the original Broadway production of “Hello, Dolly,” a smash hit, ran only 2,844 performances.) Anticipation for the Cirque-Angel collaboration ran so high in the spring that scalpers had begun to sell tickets to a show that didn’t even exist yet, and Angel was forced to put up a notice on his website in March warning about counterfeits.
Early previews begin in August, with the show’s grand opening scheduled for September. Not surprisingly, the Luxor has taken out an enormous insurance policy on its star; there are no understudies, and Angel knows he has to be in the shape of his life to perform grueling feats for three hours a day.
“I have to have the ability to be more challenging than a David Copperfield show,” he says, “to endure a strenuous show with amazing levitation effects, a show where a tornado comes out of my mouth and wraps around the whole theater….”
He paused. “Look, forget about magic shows. We are going to create something unlike anything else in the world of magic and entertainment — one that will allow everyone in the audience to react emotionally, to reflect on their own lives. And to do it on this magnitude…I’m just blessed and excited.”
