The video was brutal.
I had recorded one of my shows — something I had started doing regularly after reading about the importance of reviewing your own performances. The routine was a mentalism piece where I reveal something impossible about a volunteer’s thoughts. It is the kind of moment that should produce genuine astonishment. The audience should gasp. The performer should look stunned by what just happened.
I watched the video three times before I could articulate what was wrong. The technique was clean. The reveal was strong. The audience reacted well. But something about my face during the climax was off. I was performing surprise. My eyebrows were up, my mouth was open, my body language said “Can you believe this?” But it looked like a cartoon. Like someone doing an impression of surprise rather than actually being surprised.
It was the emotional equivalent of a rubber mask. The shape was right, but nothing was alive underneath it.
That video sent me looking for help in a direction I had never considered: acting.
The Problem with Performed Emotions
Ken Weber identifies this issue precisely in Maximum Entertainment when he discusses technique E of communicating your humanity: reveal emotions. His advice is straightforward and uncompromising. If you want to project surprise, you must feel surprised. If you want to project wonder, you must feel wonder. Stay in the moment. Be honest about your inner state. The audience can detect the difference between a performed emotion and a real one with startling accuracy.
This hit me hard because I had been performing emotions for my entire magic career. Not just surprise — everything. The fascination when examining a volunteer’s response. The intensity during a reading. The delight when something “works.” None of it was fake, exactly, but none of it was real either. It was a performance of emotion layered on top of whatever I was actually feeling, which was usually a mixture of concentration and anxiety about whether the technique was going right.
I was doing what most performers do: using my face as a display screen while my mind ran the technical program behind it. And the disconnect, even if the audience could not name it, was undermining every emotional moment in my show.
The Decision to Study Acting
The decision to take acting classes was not easy. I am a forty-something strategy consultant. Walking into a room full of drama students and aspiring actors felt about as comfortable as my first open mic performance — which is to say, not comfortable at all.
But Weber recommends it explicitly. He argues that acting training is invaluable for magicians because it teaches what most magicians never learn: how to be emotionally authentic while performing rehearsed material. And Ralphie May, the comedian whose masterclass I had been studying, credits acting classes with transforming his stage comfort and presence. If it was good enough for both of them, I figured my ego could survive a few workshops.
I found a course in Vienna that focused on physical theater and emotional authenticity — not the kind of acting that teaches you to cry on command, but the kind that teaches you to access genuine feeling in structured situations. The instructor was a woman named Katrin who had spent twenty years in theater and had absolutely zero interest in magic or my opinions about it.
It was one of the best educational experiences of my life.
The “Magic If”
The concept that changed everything came not from the acting class directly but from Derren Brown’s Absolute Magic, where he references Stanislavski’s technique. Brown explains Stanislavski’s approach to emotional truth through the mechanism of the “Magic If”: rather than trying to perform the external signs of an emotion — the trembling lips of fear, the wide eyes of surprise — the actor asks: “What would I do if this were really happening?”
This question bypasses the entire problem of emotional fakery. Instead of trying to manufacture the visible symptoms of an emotion, you engage your imagination with the situation itself, and the emotions arise naturally as a consequence.
When I first tried this during practice, the difference was immediate and almost unsettling.
I was running through my mentalism routine in a hotel room in Linz. I got to the reveal moment, and instead of performing my rehearsed “surprise face,” I asked myself: what would I genuinely feel if I could actually read someone’s mind? Not the trick version — the real version. If I had just reached into another human being’s consciousness and extracted a thought, what would that be like?
The answer was not surprise. Not really. It would be something more complex — awe, maybe. A touch of fear. The uncanny sense of having crossed a boundary that should not be crossable. The vertigo of encountering the impossible.
When I played the routine with that internal state, my external expression changed completely. It was subtler, stranger, more compelling. I was not performing surprise. I was allowing a genuine response to an imagined reality, and the result was an emotional expression that no amount of facial choreography could have produced.
What the Acting Class Taught Me
Katrin, my acting instructor, had a phrase she used constantly: “Don’t show me. Be it.”
This sounds like the kind of thing that gets printed on inspirational posters, but in practice it was a rigorous technical principle. She would give us a scenario — you have just received news that changes your life — and we would perform our response. Inevitably, for the first several sessions, I would perform the emotion. Big expressions. Clear, readable faces. Acting, in the pejorative sense.
And Katrin would stop me every time. “You are showing me what the emotion looks like. I want you to feel what it feels like. The face will take care of itself.”
She was right. When I stopped trying to control my facial expression and instead focused entirely on the internal experience — really imagining the scenario, really allowing myself to respond — the external result was always more compelling. Often smaller. Often stranger. But always more real.
This is the paradox of emotional authenticity in performance: the less you try to show the emotion, the more clearly the audience sees it. Because real emotions are complex, layered, and slightly unpredictable. They do not look like the icons on an emoji keyboard. A person who is genuinely surprised does not look like a cartoon of surprise. They look surprised in their own specific, individual way, and that specificity is what reads as true.
The Hotel Room Laboratory
I started incorporating the “Magic If” into my regular practice sessions. Not just for the climax moments, but for the entire routine.
In a hotel room in Innsbruck, I would run through a card routine and ask myself: what would I feel if this card really transformed in my hands? Not “How should I react?” but “What would this be like?”
In a hotel room in Zurich, I would practice a mentalism piece and genuinely imagine that the connection I was establishing with the imaginary volunteer was real. What would it feel like to sense another person’s thoughts? What would that do to my breathing, my posture, the way I held my hands?
These practice sessions were different from anything I had done before. They were slower. More internal. Less about getting the sequence right and more about getting the feeling right. And they were exhausting in a way that purely technical practice never was, because they required genuine emotional engagement rather than mechanical repetition.
But the results, when I brought them to live performance, were transformative.
The First Real Performance After
I remember the first corporate show I did after about two months of this work. It was a private event in Salzburg, maybe fifty people. I performed essentially the same material I had been doing before the acting classes. Same effects, same structure, same scripts.
But the emotional layer was completely different. I was not performing surprise at the reveals. I was allowing myself to feel the “Magic If” version of what was happening. I was not performing fascination with the volunteer’s choices. I was genuinely curious about this specific person, in this specific moment, making this specific decision.
After the show, something happened that had never happened before. Multiple people told me not that the tricks were amazing, but that I seemed genuinely amazed by what was happening. One woman said: “You looked like you couldn’t believe it either.”
That was the highest compliment I had ever received as a performer. Because it meant the emotional performance had become invisible. The audience was not seeing a person acting surprised. They were seeing a person who was, in some real sense, surprised. The “Magic If” had done its work — I had imagined the scenario deeply enough that my response was genuine, and the audience read it as genuine, because it was.
The Emotional Vocabulary Expansion
One of the unexpected benefits of studying acting was what I think of as emotional vocabulary expansion. Before the classes, my performance emotions were essentially a set of three or four defaults: surprise, delight, intensity, and concern. These were the emotional colors I knew how to deploy, and I deployed them constantly.
After the classes, I discovered that the palette was vastly wider. There were emotions I had never thought to bring to a performance: curiosity, vulnerability, mischief, tenderness, unease, wonder that borders on reverence. These were available to me as a person — I felt all of them in daily life — but I had never given myself permission to feel them on stage.
Katrin had said something in one of the early sessions that stayed with me: “Most people walk on stage and immediately reduce themselves to a simpler version. They become a cartoon of a person. Your job is to walk on stage and remain the full, complicated, contradictory human being you actually are.”
She was talking about actors. She could have been talking about magicians.
Why Magicians Resist This
I understand the resistance to emotional authenticity in magic, because I shared it for years. There is a fear that if you allow yourself to feel real emotions on stage, you will lose control. That the emotion will interfere with the technique. That you will become so absorbed in the feeling that you will forget the method, drop the force, flash the move.
This fear is not entirely unfounded. In the early days of practicing the “Magic If” approach, there were moments where my concentration on the emotional reality did pull my focus from the technical execution. It was like learning to walk and chew gum at the same time — two processes that each demanded full attention, forced to share a single mind.
But this is exactly what rehearsal is for. You rehearse the technique until it is automatic — until it runs without conscious attention. And then you free your conscious attention for the emotional reality of the performance. The technique becomes the infrastructure. The emotion becomes the experience.
This is what actors do. They memorize lines until the lines are automatic. And then they forget them, in the sense that they stop thinking about them consciously and allow the words to emerge from genuine engagement with the scene. The preparation is rigorous and mechanical. The performance is alive and spontaneous. The preparation enables the spontaneity.
The Integration
What I do now is something I could not have done three years ago. I perform technically demanding material while simultaneously engaging with the emotional reality of what that material represents. I am running two tracks at once: the technical track, which operates at a level below conscious attention, and the emotional track, which is fully conscious, fully present, fully alive to the moment.
This is not easy. It requires a level of preparation that goes beyond what most performers invest. You cannot fake the emotional track if the technical track is unreliable — the anxiety will override everything. And you cannot be genuinely present emotionally if part of your mind is worrying about the next move.
But when it works — when both tracks are running cleanly and the audience is receiving not just an impossible effect but a genuine human response to that impossibility — the result is something qualitatively different from what I was doing before.
It is the difference between watching a person perform a trick and watching a person experience something extraordinary. The audience does not want to see a performer who is in control of every emotion. They want to see a person who is genuinely moved by what is happening. Who is present, open, and real.
Katrin told me once: “The audience does not come to see you act. They come to see you be.”
She was talking about theater. But she was talking about everything.