Cirque du Soleil. America’s Got Talent. Penn & Teller: Fool Us. Masters of Illusion.
Xavier Mortimer has done them all.
Mortimer fell in love with magic when he was a kid growing up in Briançon, France. The catalyst, as he told Vegas Never Sleeps in 2019, was seeing a local magician performing at a restaurant. His father subsequently gifted him a book on magic, and Mortimer never looked back. In just a decade, he went from hawking flowers at a local market so he could buy props, to performing his own show at Theatre Le Temple in Paris.
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From there, he was picked up by Cirque du Soleil, and after a three-year tour with them, ended up landing his own nightly stage show in Las Vegas.
Mortimer, who by then was an expert at his craft and had featured on the above TV shows, figured it was time to try pitching his own series. The concept was deceptively simple: Instead of putting on a public performance, he’d go somewhere like a coffee shop and do subtle tricks like having a napkin zip across the room and into his hand–the sort of thing that could convince a bystander that maybe he really was a wizard.
But no networks agreed to greenlight the idea for production.
So, when TikTok’s precursor/former rival musical.ly began to take off, Mortimer decided to do the producing himself.
We’ll let him tell you the rest of that story below, but we will spoil that Mortimer–who has 17 million followers on Facebook, 8.2 million subscribers on YouTube, 5.5 million followers on TikTok, and 3 million followers on Instagram–now has the resources to make his TV show happen, thanks to his social media presence and support from Viral Nation’s film and TV development arm.
Expect to see more on that in the future. For now, let’s dive into our chat with “the Dream Maker”…
Tubefilter: Obviously you’ve done a lot with magic in your lifetime. Tell us what you were working on before you got into social media.
Xavier Mortimer: It’s actually very funny. I pitched a show to a couple of producers, a TV show, and the concept was basically a real-life wizard. Someone who just walks in the streets, doesn’t necessarily perform, but just does random things in front of people that are magic.
For example, you go to Starbucks and, well, you need a napkin. But you don’t walk to the napkin, the napkin comes to you. That was the whole idea: How would a magician act if he was in real life?
I pitched that idea and no one picked it up. I didn’t get my show, basically. Then social media came and I was like “Oh! I have a phone! I can do this! This is pretty good!” I figured, if it works, great, if it doesn’t, well, the TV executives were right. And they were wrong!
Tubefilter: Clearly! How did you start with social media? What was your first platform?
Xavier Mortimer: I opened an account right when musical.ly was transitioning to TikTok. It was just young kids dancing, so I wasn’t sure, but I was like, “Okay, I’ll try to publish my videos.” And they got lots of views! I was like, “Okay, that’s the test, that’s proved it.”
So I started to publish on other platforms, like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. People started to discover me this way, and it was a learning experience, because I didn’t know that people would be happy to see a different type of magic from what I was used to doing. I was always afraid of what people would say. I went through so many steps, where first it’s bad, then you get traction and people discover you and they’re kind of like, “Uhh, okay, this isn’t magic, this is social media.” But then you grow and get bigger and bigger and put more energy into your production.
Tubefilter: I think that’s a pretty universal experience, where creators feel their first content isn’t very good, that they haven’t found their footing yet. When did things start to come together for you?
Xavier Mortimer: My first viral video was at Starbucks. I made a napkin fly and a cup of coffee come to me. The video instantly got millions of views. I was like, “Wow!” You know that feeling of your first viral video? You’re refreshing every minute, I was getting thousands of views every minute. It showed me that I can go viral, so let’s keep doing it.
I took my idea and put it in different situations. What if I’m at a fast food restaurant, what if I’m at the library, what if I’m at the casino? This guy who’s walking in Target or Walmart and just does incredible things that people barely notice, but it’s magic.
Tubefilter: What was it like transitioning from doing onstage magic to magic on video? Is there a different feel?
Xavier Mortimer: Live show is a completely different animal. There are similarities, like you create illusions and magic tricks that can be performed, that are reliably performable. But when you play for the camera, you can do smaller things, and also you can be in different situations, like in a restaurant, in a library. So that gives you context, a reason to do your magic.
When you’re onstage, you’re here to entertain a big audience, so you’re here to present something. The difference between being on video/social media and being onstage, is the same difference between an actor doing a movie and a play. It’s not the same acting, it’s bigger when you’re acting onstage.
Tubefilter: How did you move forward and develop your content and grow your audience after that initial viral video?
Xavier Mortimer: I got so many viral videos from that same concept. I started to publish them across platforms, and they did well on every platform, which proved they are something successful. That was really my foot into the social media business. I did that for a year or two, where it was always the same pattern.
Then I was like, Let’s do something different. Things I always wanted to do, but I didn’t have the money, the connections. But now I can do that. Now I can invest $20,000 or more into one video, so I start to publish long-form videos on YouTube.
Tubefilter: And now you’ve posted hundreds of YouTube videos. What’s next?
Xavier Mortimer: I want to keep doing this. I have so many new ideas coming in. I get so much joy from coming up with an idea and putting it together and seeing if it works, seeing if the video will go viral. I have a few big videos coming up, and we’re actually in the process of making a TV show from this concept, from what I’ve been publishing online. There are so many things happening now. Then, in a few years, when it’s harder for me or when it’s died down, I will maybe go back to a Vegas show. I could be home every day, settle down. [laughs] But for now, I really want to ride that wave.
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