Kevin Hamdan can read your mind. His social media pages — where he’s racked up almost 700,000 followers on Instagram and 1.7 million likes on TikTok — are filled with videos of the mentalist stopping people in the streets of Toronto, asking them to think of a name or a memory before seemingly reading their thoughts exactly. But that kind of magic (or, fine, the illusion of magic) doesn’t happen without some training.
“When I was six, my dad showed me a card trick where he guessed what card I had picked. At that moment, I was like, ‘How is this possible?’” Hamdan says. “I was also watching Criss Angel and David Blaine videos and tried to create my own way to do what they’re doing.”
It was the mind reading part, less so the magic, that intrigued Hamdan. So he would visit the library, learning how to do card tricks and teaching himself psychology. “I had to learn how to get inside people’s minds, read people’s thoughts. I was studying the psychology of people, how people process information, and then combining all those skills under the umbrella of magic and psychology to create mentalism,” Hamdan says.
He notes that mentalism is the illusion of mind reading, suggestion and influence — “essentially, the magic of the mind.”
When you watch Hamdan guess someone’s password or the name of their first kiss now, it seems too easy — almost like magic. But he says it was hundreds of hours of practise that got him to this place. “I’ve been practising since I was six years old. By the time I hit Grade 8, I was getting a lot better at the presentation aspect,” he says.
But when classmates in high school began making fun of him for it, Hamdan stopped doing mentalism entirely until Grade 11.
“I wish I didn’t quit, I wish I didn’t listen to the noise,” he says. “But everything that happened led me to where I am today — I wouldn’t change anything.”
Once he was back, Hamddan would perform constantly for students and knew he would be doing mentalism for the rest of his life.
So what does a mentalist study in university? Not psychology. “I had this suspicion that school would de-motivate me from the thing I wanted to do, so I didn’t want to study psychology and have that happen,” he says. Hamdan pursued a degree in jazz guitar at York University instead and found that his suspicion was right.
“Music started to feel like a chore. I enjoyed it much more when I was playing alone or with friends.”
After university, Hamdan spent months trying to build up engagement and a following through social media, shooting and posting videos every day and trying different styles to see what clicked. The engagement happened slowly and then suddenly: from 2021 to now, Hamdan’s following on TikTok and Instagram grew exponentially, and he started landing interviews on shows such as Cityline and booking more and more party appearances.
So was he born with it? Hamdan sees being a mentalist as a skill that he’s perfected over time, though it’s hard not to believe you’re witnessing magic watching him get it right time and time again.
“I believe that, as entertainers, we’re born with the ability to connect with people,” Hamdan says. “My mom always said I had the entertainer in me from a young age. And I will say that I have a good gut feeling.”
But the rest? It’s all an illusion.