There is a moment, early in every performer’s journey, when they have to make a choice that most of them do not realize they are making. The choice is between being themselves on stage and being a character. And almost everyone, without thinking about it, chooses character.
Not a dramatic character. Not a full persona with a backstory and a costume change. Something subtler and more insidious: a slight shift in voice, a different energy level, a way of holding themselves that says “I am performing now.” A veneer so thin that the person underneath barely notices they have put it on.
I wore mine for about a year before I caught myself doing it. And catching myself was the easy part. Taking it off was the hard part.
The Two Models
Derren Brown, in Absolute Magic, describes two fundamental approaches to performance character. The first is building from the outside in — starting with how you want to look and sound, adopting mannerisms and affectations, and hoping that the internal reality will eventually catch up with the external presentation. The second is building from the inside out — starting with who you actually are, identifying the aspects of your personality that are most conducive to the kind of performance you want to create, and theatrically enhancing those real traits.
Most performers default to outside-in. They see someone they admire and adopt elements of that person’s style. They decide they should be mysterious, or funny, or intense, and they perform that decision. The result feels assembled rather than organic. It is a patchwork of borrowed elements, and the audience can sense the seams even if they cannot identify them specifically.
Inside-out is harder and scarier. It requires self-knowledge. It requires vulnerability. It requires the willingness to stand on stage as yourself — no mask, no buffer, no character to hide behind — and trust that who you actually are is interesting enough to hold the room.
I remember the first time I tried to perform without the veneer. It was at a private event in Vienna, maybe thirty people, fairly intimate. I had consciously decided to drop the vocal register shift, the slightly theatrical gestures, the Performing Felix mask. I was just going to be me. The same person who had been chatting with guests during the cocktail hour.
It was terrifying. Without the character, I felt exposed. Every pause felt too long. Every joke felt riskier. I could not hide behind the persona when something did not land. I was just a person, standing there, hoping the audience would connect with the real version.
They did. The feedback that night was the warmest I had received. Not because the material was different. Because the person delivering it was recognizable as a human being rather than a performer.
The Exception That Proves the Rule
Here is where it gets complicated. Because while I am arguing for authenticity, I also have to acknowledge that some of the most beloved performers in history have been characters. Not themselves. Elaborate, committed characters that bore little resemblance to the person offstage.
Think about the great character acts in magic and beyond. The elegant drunk who cannot seem to keep the cards from appearing between his fingers. The befuddled professor who keeps losing track of his own demonstration. The deadpan eccentric who treats the most extraordinary moments as if they were perfectly ordinary. These are not authentic in the be-yourself sense. They are fictional constructs. And some of them are magnificent.
The difference — and this is the crucial distinction — is commitment. A half-committed character is worse than no character at all. If you adopt a persona but cannot fully inhabit it, the audience sees neither the character nor the person. They see someone pretending, and pretending is the most off-putting thing a performer can do.
Fitzkee wrote about this in the 1940s, and it still holds. He argued that character was the seasoning of entertainment — the thing that made the raw ingredients palatable. But the character had to be maintained throughout the entire performance. The moment you break character, the moment the mask slips, the audience loses trust. Either you are the drunk who cannot stop producing cards, or you are Felix from Austria who finds psychology fascinating. You cannot be both. The audience needs to know which reality they are in.
The Commitment Test
So how do you know whether to play a character or be yourself? I think there is a simple test, and it comes from watching performers across both categories.
Ask yourself: could I sustain this character for an entire evening? Not just during the performance. During the pre-show mingling. During the dinner break. During the post-show conversations. Could I stay in this character when someone asks me a genuine question about myself? When a volunteer does something unexpected? When the projector fails and I need to fill time for three minutes?
If the answer is yes — if the character is so fully developed and so deeply inhabited that it holds up under any circumstance — then you have something. You have a genuine performance identity that the audience will accept and invest in. Not because it is real, but because it is real enough. The commitment itself creates a kind of authenticity.
If the answer is no — if the character would crack under pressure, if you would need to break it to handle a disruption, if it only works during the scripted portions of the show — then you do not have a character. You have a costume. And costumes, in performance, are transparent.
For most of us, the answer is no. Most of us are not character actors. We have not spent years developing an alternative persona with the depth and specificity required to sustain it in all conditions. We have cobbled together a few borrowed mannerisms and a slightly different voice, and we call it our “stage presence.”
That is not a character. That is a veneer. And a veneer is always visible.
What Happened When I Dropped Mine
After that first veneer-free show in Vienna, I did not immediately become comfortable being myself on stage. It took months. And during those months, I went through a period I can only describe as performance nakedness — the feeling of being on stage without armour.
Every insecurity I had was suddenly audible in the room. Without the veneer to hide behind, I had to confront the fact that I was a strategy consultant from Austria who had picked up card tricks in hotel rooms and was now, improbably, standing in front of paying audiences claiming to be worth their attention. There was no “Magician” character to project. There was just me. And me was, in those early post-veneer months, somewhat uncertain about whether me was enough.
The thing that saved me was noticing how the audience responded to moments of genuine uncertainty. When I was honest about being surprised by a volunteer’s choice. When I let the audience see that I found their reactions genuinely delightful rather than performing delight. When I admitted, with a self-deprecating smile, that something had not gone the way I expected.
These moments — moments where the person was visible through the performer — consistently generated the strongest connections. The audience leaned in. They laughed more warmly. They seemed to care more about what happened next. Because they were watching a person, not a show. And people, it turns out, are inherently more interesting than shows.
The Consulting Parallel
I have seen the same dynamic in consulting, incidentally. The partners who built the deepest client relationships were almost never the ones with the most polished presentation styles. They were the ones who were willing to say “I don’t know” in a boardroom. Who would admit when a competitor’s approach had merit. Who would show genuine interest in the client’s challenges rather than performing interest as a sales technique.
These partners were not characters. They were not playing a role. They were bringing their actual personalities — curious, direct, occasionally uncertain, always honest — into the professional context. And clients responded to that authenticity the same way audiences respond to it in performance: with trust, with warmth, with loyalty.
The consultants who maintained a polished professional mask at all times were respected. The ones who let the mask drop occasionally were loved. And in consulting, just as in magic, love beats respect for long-term success.
The Middle Path
So here is where I have landed on the character question, and it might sound contradictory but I think it is the most honest answer I can give.
The audience wants you. The real you. The polished version of the real you, but unmistakably you. They want to feel that the person on stage is a person, not a construction. They want to connect with someone genuine, and they can tell the difference between genuine and performed.
Unless.
Unless you are willing to commit so completely to a character that the character itself becomes a kind of truth. Unless the character is so deeply developed, so thoroughly inhabited, so consistent in every moment, that the audience stops seeing it as a character and starts experiencing it as a reality. That level of commitment creates its own authenticity — not the authenticity of “this is who I really am” but the authenticity of “this person exists, fully, in this moment.”
Very few performers reach that level. The ones who do are extraordinary. For the rest of us — for me, certainly — the safer, more rewarding, and more sustainable path is the one that starts with who we actually are.
I am a strategy consultant who fell into magic as an adult. I am genuinely fascinated by how people think. I have a dry sense of humor that is better suited to observation than to punchlines. I get nervous before shows and excited during them. I practice in hotel rooms because I travel constantly. I co-founded a magic company with my friend Adam, which is still a fact that surprises me.
That is who I am. And after a year of trying to be someone else on stage, I discovered that who I am is, against all my expectations, enough.
The audience does not want a character. They want a person. Be one.
Unless you can be a character so completely that the audience forgets you are performing. Then be that.
But know the difference. Because the space between a committed character and a transparent veneer is the space where performers lose their audiences.