Teller

At 76 years old, Teller physical status not available right now. We will update Teller's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Teller (born Raymond Joseph Teller on February 14, 1948) is an American magician, illusionist, writer, actor, painter, and film director.

He is half of the comedy magic duo Penn & Teller, along with Penn Jillette.

Teller usually does not speak during performances.

He is an atheist, debunker, skeptic, and a fellow of the Cato Institute (a free market libertarian think tank that also lists Jillette as a fellow), an organization which is featured prominently in the duo's Showtime series Bullshit!.

Teller legally changed his name from "Raymond Joseph Teller" to the mononym "Teller".

Personal life

Teller was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Irene B. (née Derrickson) and Israel Max "Joseph" Teller (1913–2004). His father, who was of Russian-Jewish descent, was born in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in Philadelphia. His mother was from a Delaware farming family. They met as painters attending art school at Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial. His mother was Methodist, and Teller was raised as "a sort of half-assed Methodist". He graduated from Philadelphia's Central High School in 1965, and in 1969 graduated from Amherst College with a Bachelor of Arts in Classics. He became a high-school Latin teacher.

Teller legally changed his birth name of "Raymond Joseph Teller" to the mononym "Teller".

Teller taught Greek and Latin at Lawrence High School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. In 2001, he was inducted into the Central High School Hall of Fame.

In 2018-2019, Teller had three back surgeries over 18 months. In early October 2022, Teller underwent open-heart surgery.

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Career

Teller began performing with his buddy Weir Chrisemer as The Othmar Schoeck Memorial Society for the Preservation of Unusual and Disgusting Music. He met Penn Jillette in 1974, and the Asparagus Valley Cultural Society, along with Chrisemer, formed a three-person group that debuted at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival and later performed in San Francisco. Jillette and Teller formed Penn & Teller in 1981, an act that continues to this day. Penn and Teller were honoured with a live performance award on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on April 5, 2013. Their star, who has been honoured to Harry Houdini, is nearing the one named to him. They were honoured by the Magic Castle with the Magicians of the Year award the following day.

When performing, the teller rarely speaks, but he does often speak in other contexts, such as interviews. Teller's characteristic silence began in his youth, when he made a living off playing magic at college fraternity parties. He discovered that if he maintained silence throughout his performance, fans avoided throwing beer and booing him and instead paid more attention to his appearance.

Teller collaborated on three magic books with Jillette, as well as the author of "When I'm Dead, All This Will Be Yours." "Benjamin Teller, A Portrait by His Kid (2000), a biography/memoir of his father" The book includes his father's paintings and 100 unpublished cartoons that were heavily inspired by George Lichty's Grin and Bear It. Publishers Weekly praised the book. In 1939, Teller's father's "serious observations of Philadelphia street life" were drawn. After opening boxes of old letters that Teller read out loud (learning about a period in his parents' lives that he never knew about, such as the fact that his father's name is actually Israel Max Teller), Teller and his father's "memories began to pump and the stories flowed"; the father's was recalled. Joe's Depression-era hobo adventures culminated in trips around the United States, Canada, and Alaska, and by 1933, he returned to Philadelphia for art study. Joe and Irene married after Joe and Irene met in evening art classes, and Joe spent half-days as a Philadelphia Inquirer copy boy. When the Inquirer rejected his cartoons, he switched to advertising art just as World War II began. Teller successfully re-creates the world of his parents in a relaxed writing style of light humor and smooth (yet highly effective) transitions between the past and present.

Teller is a co-author of the paper "Attention and Knowledge in Stage Magic: Turning Tricks into Study," which was published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience in November 2008.

Teller wrote Play Dead, a "throwback to the spook shows of the 1930s and 1940s" that ran in Las Vegas from September 12–24, before opening Off Broadway in New York. Todd Robbins, a sideshow performer and magician, appears on the show.

Teller and Aaron Posner co-directed a Macbeth version in 2008 that used stage magic effects in the scenes with the Three Witches. Teller and Posner co-directed a version of The Tempest in 2014, which made use of stage magic once more; in an interview, Teller said that "Shakespeare wrote one play about a magician, and it seemed that it was about time to find that with all the magic capabilities in the theater, one could be based on this." Teller and Posner co-conceived and produced a brand new Macbeth performance at Chicago Shakespeare Theater in Chicago, Illinois, in 2018.

Tim's Vermeer, Teller's first feature film film film, was released in 2014. He and Jillette were executive producers for Sony Pictures Classics, with Jillette serving as executive producers.

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