Ricky Jay

Magic came first and never stopped being first. Jay, born Richard Jay Potash in Brooklyn in 1946, was a stage magician and a serious writer on the history of magic, known for card work, card throwing, memory feats and the patter that held all of it together. Mark Singer's 1993 New Yorker profile called him perhaps the most gifted sleight of hand artist alive, and the sentence followed him for the rest of his life. The oldest screen credit in this catalog is an appearance on The Paul Daniels Magic Show in 1979.

The acting career is largely one long collaboration. David Mamet cast him as George in House of Games in 1987 and kept casting him: Things Change, The Spanish Prisoner, State and Main, Heist, Redbelt and the series The Unit. The fit is obvious the moment you hear him. He delivered information like a man holding most of it back, flat and unhurried, so that a plain sentence landed as the opening move in something. Directors used the voice on its own too, in Magnolia and The Brothers Bloom.

Outside that, he was Henry Gupta in Tomorrow Never Dies, Vic Weems in Mystery Men, Milton in The Prestige and T.H. Vignetti in Sneaky Pete. His credit list elsewhere includes Boogie Nights and Deadwood, neither of which this catalog connects to him. In 2015 he was the subject of an episode of PBS's American Masters. He died in 2018.