Neil Patrick Harris

Five of the ten sit in air signs and not one sits in earth, with three in water and two in fire. Air works out the mechanism of a thing, and with no earth at all nothing here settles into a single fixed form. Harris is an American actor and a magician, which is the one pairing of trades where both halves consist of getting an audience to look where you want them looking.

The Sun sits at twenty four degrees of Gemini with Saturn a third of a degree away, and the Moon sits opposite them both in Sagittarius. Gemini is the sign of misdirection, of the quick hand and the two things happening at once; having Saturn fused to the identity inside it is the discipline that separates a trick that works from one that nearly works. The Moon facing both across the zodiac keeps the private half permanently opposite the public one.

Two T-squares run through this chart and both of them hold the Moon and Mars, which puts feeling and drive under structural load twice over with no outlet in either configuration. Mars is at a hard angle to Jupiter at an eighth of a degree, the tightest thing here, so drive meets the planet of scale in friction rather than agreement. Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune were all retrograde. For a performer who acts and does magic, drive in friction with scale is the tension between the trick that works and the one that over reaches.

Jupiter worked its way back to its opening Aquarius degree on 8 February 2021, at forty seven, in reverse at both ends. Aquarius counts distance from the expected rather than progress towards it, and four laps precede it. For somebody who has sustained two quite separate performing careers rather than one, that is the measure the record was always going to be scored on. With no earth anywhere in the chart there was never a version of this working life that settled into one thing and stayed there.