PASADENA, California USA, September 8, 2026 — Young & Strange, the British illusion duo of childhood friends Richard Young and Sam Strange, advanced to the semifinals of America’s Got Talent Season 21 on Tuesday night, closing out the season’s quarterfinal round and bringing the number of magic acts still alive in the competition to four.
Young and Strange delivered a strong audition performance in June, previously covered by Conjurly, to advance to the quarterfinals without a judges’ callback.
Their quarter-final routine opened with a bit of practiced chaos. After quietly taking up a careful position on the empty stage, Strange slowly raised a black drape stenciled with a chalk-outline human silhouette, holding it there and looking behind it, until Young popped up through the stage floor directly in front of the banner. “I don’t believe it,” Young said, feigning exasperation. “I told you to measure from the back of the stage in feet, not meters.” The duo played the near-miss for laughs before the pair turned to the judges: “Since our first audition, we’ve taken on board your thoughts. Tonight, Young & Strange’s magic will be even bigger and more spectacular,” Young promised. “Because we’ve brought with us a Las Vegas-style illusion,” Strange added.
What followed was billed as a “world-first grand illusion under impossible conditions” — a metamorphosis box built, the duo pointed out, with its front and sides left open throughout, raised off the stage floor to rule out trap doors, and performed under full stage lighting with nowhere to hide. Young climbed into a bag and was locked inside the cage-like box. Strange threw a drape over himself and vanished in an instant with Young taking his place. But when the bag was untied and the box opened, it wasn’t the expected Strange standing inside. It was a woman.
The reveal kept going. As the box trick landed, Strange turned up aloft, swinging on a cable above the crowd toward the judges’ table — high enough that the safety line, measured out in the same mismatched units that caused the opening mishap, came up just short of the stage. Reaching out with a fake hand fixed to the end of a telescoping handle, he went for the judges’ Golden Buzzer and narrowly missed it. A comedic spoof shower of golden buzzer confetti fell anyway as the act closed to a standing ovation from all four judges.
The judges’ table struggled to keep up. “What you did tonight — yes, it was one trick, but it was a combination of many tricks,” Mel B said. “It wasn’t a trick. It was freakin’ magic!” Heidi Klum, filling in for Simon Cowell as he continues to recover from back surgery, agreed: “I could see this in Vegas!”
Sofía Vergara came closest to making the moment even bigger. She admitted she wanted to hit her live Golden Buzzer for the duo “so bad,” but said it “wasn’t fair because it’s the first act of the night,” calling their magic “perfection.” Howie Mandel told the pair he’d have given them the buzzer himself if it had been his to give. Vergara ultimately held onto the night’s Golden Buzzer and used it later on human-robot dance troupe Unitree, sending the act directly to the finals.
Young & Strange didn’t need it. Host Terry Crews called the duo to the stage opposite impressionist Cameron Logsdon, and it was Young & Strange who moved on, joining comic singer Cesar Dias and singer Travis Garland as the three acts America voted through from the ten-act field. Rock duo Bird & Byron and singer Lara D also reached the night’s Top 5 but were cut in the final round.
Young & Strange faced a skeptic in Cowell during their audition when the pair performed a dangerous close-up illusion at the judges’ table. Cowell expressed muted keenness, which earned him audience boos, while Mandel, Mel B, and Vergara enthusiastically voted yes to send them through. Their quarterfinal performance received unanimous praise from the judges.
Young & Strange bring an established résumé to the AGT stage. Young and Strange are childhood friends from the UK who honed their act across four consecutive Edinburgh Fringe Festival runs, have headlined the world’s largest international touring magic show, Champions of Magic, since 2013, and have performed in the West End as part of Wonderville at the Palace Theatre. The duo has also appeared on Penn & Teller: Fool Us three times — in 2011, 2017 and 2025 — without fooling the pair.
The night’s broadcast also gave the magic and mentalism community another moment in the spotlight. Season 10 finalist Oz Pearlman, who took third place in 2015 and later returned for AGT: The Champions 2, made a guest appearance, pulling Heidi Klum and the studio audience into a mind-linking routine that closed with a reveal connecting author and podcast host Jay Shetty to a randomly chosen seat in the crowd where Shetty himself was seated for a surprise appearance.
With Tuesday’s results, the Season 21 quarterfinals are officially finished and a strong showing by magicians continues. Duo Young & Strange joins fellow magicians Kameron Marshall and Geno Ploeger in the semifinal field, while magic group Hundred Fingers has already bypassed the semifinals entirely on the strength of a Golden Buzzer earlier in the season — bringing the season’s total of surviving magic acts to four, spread across two different paths to the finale.
That ties the all-time record for magic acts surviving an AGT quarterfinal round, matching the mark set in Season 9 back in 2014, when Mat Franco, David & Leeman, Mike Super and Smoothini all advanced together to the semifinals leading up to Franco’s championship win. The comparison comes with an asterisk: Season 9 predates the live quarterfinal Golden Buzzer, so all four of that season’s magic acts earned their spot through the semifinals the traditional way, while Season 21’s four are split between three semifinalists and one act, Hundred Fingers, that skipped the semifinals entirely. Format differences aside, the raw number stands: no AGT season has carried more magic acts past its quarterfinal round than these two.
The Season 21 AGT Semifinals air on NBC in prime-time September 15–16, followed by the finals and finale on September 22–23.
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