TikTok star Henry Di (Sargent’24,’26)—who goes by the stage name Enrique the Magician—has been practicing magic for eight years, getting his start after being inspired by a trick his grandfather showed him. Photo by Huacheng (Sam) Li (Questrom’24)

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Abracadabra! Student Magician Henry Di’s Rise to TikTok Stardom

Enrique the Magician is studying at Sargent while filming himself performing card tricks and making $100 bills disappear

“When I go through the cards like this, I want you to tell me to stop somewhere in the middle,” TikTok star Henry Di (Sargent’24,’26) says to someone off camera as he flips through a standard 52-card deck. 

When they give the word, Di—who goes by the stage name Enrique the Magician—displays the nine of hearts. He puts the card back in the middle of the deck, waves his hand, and the nine of hearts magically jumps to the top of the deck.

“That’s crazy, right?” he asks, before fanning out the deck to show that all the cards have turned into the nine of hearts. He grins.

From his dorm room at Boston University or back home in Melrose, Mass., Di spends anywhere from 10 minutes to several hours, almost daily, filming sleight-of-hand magic tricks, often telling viewers they are not going to believe what is about to happen. Besides cards, Di has tricks that involve optical illusions, solving a Rubik’s Cube while blindfolded, and disappearing iPhone cases and toothpicks. Another video has him cutting a $100 bill in half and then repairing it with the snap of his fingers seconds later. 

All of this sleight-of-hand magic has turned Di into something of a social media star. He has accounts on Instagram, YouTube, and Omegle, a website that pairs strangers through video and text chat. But most of his engagement comes from TikTok: he has more than 437,000 TikTok followers and 8.8 million likes on his videos. His top video (another card trick) has more than 72.9 million views, and he has 17 videos surpassing a million watches. While his most popular stage is on social media, Di always has a deck of cards in his backpack and will perform for friends or at kids’ birthday parties if asked. 

Di, 20, has been practicing magic for eight years, getting his start after being inspired by a trick his grandfather showed him. He started scrolling YouTube for magicians (one of his favorites was Mat Franco, who won season nine of America’s Got Talent) and learned from those videos. His stage name, Enrique the Magician, came about because “Enrique” was the name he adopted in his high school Spanish classes.

His tricks are not always entirely original, and are often adapted from other magicians, but with his own twist. An example of this is a trick where he tells the viewer to choose from two different dollar amounts, where he ultimately “knows” the amount they pick in the end. His spin on this trick is forcing the viewer to pick the lower dollar amount, and then having that amount turn into hundreds of (fake) dollars. “A lot of times ideas come into my head whenever I’m just doing random stuff, and I rush to write it down so I can remember it later,” he says. 

Outside of magic, Di plays for a semiprofessional soccer team. He is also busy with schoolwork, as he is enrolled in College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences: Sargent College’s combined six-year bachelor’s in health studies/doctor of physical therapy program. He says he would consider a career as a professional magician if his fan base exploded to the level of other hugely popular TikTok magicians. For instance, SeanDoesMagic counts 21.3 million followers. 

TikTok and Facebook algorithms do sometimes influence the kinds of tricks he performs, in an effort to get more likes, saves, and comments. “The way social media is run, sometimes the viewers are not willing or interested in watching a whole story, a whole performance,” Di says. “I’ve seen really skilled magicians, way more skillful than I am, do amazing tricks, but they end up having no views. But the thing that social media and TikTok likes is that hybrid, fast-paced kind of magic, so on social media, I end up doing more of those even though, in person, I really like to do card tricks.”

Di says he sometimes struggles with balancing how long a video takes to make, and the payoff. Faster and easier ones often perform better than longer, more complicated tricks. “Then I have to take a step back and think it’s about what the audience wants to see, it’s not necessarily what I always enjoy or love making,” he says.

He aims to post twice a day, five days a week in the summer (less frequently during the school year), which he says is necessary to keep growing his followers and building engagement. He acknowledges it can be exhausting, and a challenge to find new ideas, but he’s always happy when he pushes through and views the final product. If he is really stuck, he’ll occasionally refilm an old trick.

Besides the fans, there is another motive inspiring Di to keep churning out videos—money. Brands reach out to him to partner and pay him anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per post. He saves most of what he makes for his education or an apartment, although he might tap into his savings soon for a better camera or lights.

This fall, he will enroll in BU Study Abroad’s marketing and communications program in London. He thinks these College of Communication classes will help him grow his magic career.

Commenters often squabble below the video about how Di did the trick, but, like any serious magician, he never tells. “I heard this joke from someone else, but anytime someone asks me to reveal the secret, I say, ‘Can you keep a secret?’ They nod, and then I answer, ‘Me too.’”