Seven years after he started his magic career, Reilly stepped onto the Duffy stage and wowed Malvern.

Freshman Andrew Reilly has been dazzling students and teachers at Malvern with his magic tricks since the start of this year. Yet he didn’t expect his hobby that started with a magic kit would go anywhere, until just a few years ago.

Doing magic was a bonding experience for Reilly and his father when he was younger. It was an easy way to connect because he could walk Reilly through the steps of the magic kit and practice with him on family members.

“I got him a Melissa and Doug Magic thing,” Andrew’s father Mr. Drew Reilly said. “So it was real, real baby tricks.”

After visiting a magician at the beach, Reilly quickly drew more of a liking to more serious magic and began to practice more and more.

“We did them. We practiced on trying to do them on his sister or his mother,” Mr. Reilly said. “Eventually we started to do them on other people, that’s when he first got into it.”

Reilly said he would often just practice from home, in bed. “As long as you’re holding cards and just shuffling them, getting a feel for them, you get better at handling them.”

With time and practice, Reilly left his father in the dust as he began to perform tricks that even Mr. Reilly didn’t know how they were done.

“Around three years ago, is when he went from, he and I fooling around with it, to he just absolutely just took off,” Mr. Reilly said. “He went from putting a little puzzle together to making cards catch on fire and go back together.”

Reilly is always looking to improve his performance as he’s always looking for more tricks to perform. Once he gets a new trick, he practices ruthlessly until he can do it flawlessly.

“If I don’t know how a trick is done, I have to know how it’s done,” Reilly said. “I learn it, I keep on practicing it until I get it. I’m always learning tricks on my free time. I write [new tricks] down in a book, I have about over a hundred.”

Reilly decided that his tricks were ready, as he went into Philadelphia for an audition this winter. The audition was to see if he would be on America’s Got Talent. His audition has not been on the show so far.

“I’m not sure how well it went,” Reilly said. “It was a fun experience. If I don’t make it, its cool, I just had fun auditioning, it was cool.”

Though Reilly says he doesn’t have any real goals for his career in magic, he strives to make everyone’s day a little bit better.

“I just want to bring joy, amazement and wonder to people all around me,” Reilly said. “That’s just my goal, just having a fun time.”

Reilly’s trick at the Christmas Talent Show, 2016