There is a quote that every magician encounters sooner or later, usually sooner. It is attributed to Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, the nineteenth-century French magician widely credited as the father of modern conjuring: “A magician is not a juggler; he is an actor playing the part of a magician.”
The first time I read this, I thought it was brilliant. It elevated the craft. It said: we are not mere tricksters, we are performers. We inhabit a role. We bring theatrical skill and presence to what would otherwise be a mechanical demonstration. It drew a line between someone who can do a trick and someone who can perform magic. I quoted it in conversations. I nodded sagely when other magicians brought it up. I treated it as settled wisdom.
Then I started actually performing — not practicing in hotel rooms, not demonstrating for friends, but performing for real audiences at corporate events and keynotes. And something about the quote started to feel off. Not wrong, exactly. But incomplete. Like a map that shows you the right continent but leaves off half the coastline.
The problem crystallized for me when I was reading Cara Hamilton’s work on storytelling for magicians. She makes a point that I have not been able to shake since: the Robert-Houdin framing implies a distance between the performer and the performance. An actor playing a part is, by definition, separate from the part they are playing. The actor knows they are not really Hamlet. They put on the role, they inhabit it for the duration of the show, and they take it off when the curtain falls.
Hamilton’s rebuttal: you are not an actor playing the role of a magician. You are a storyteller, telling the story of why the impossible happens. And that distinction changes everything.
The Problem with Acting the Part
When I was starting out, I approached performing the way the Robert-Houdin quote suggests. I was an Austrian strategy consultant who did magic. On stage, I “acted” the part of a magician. I adopted what I thought a magician should look like, sound like, move like. I tried to project mystery and command. I spoke in ways I would never speak in a business meeting or over dinner with friends. I created a character — not deliberately, but by default. The character was “Felix performing magic,” and he was subtly different from Felix.
The audiences could tell. Not consciously — nobody ever said “you seem like you’re acting.” But there was a barrier between me and the room. A glass wall. I could see them, they could see me, but something was preventing the kind of genuine connection that makes a performance transcend technique. My early shows were competent. They got reactions at the right moments. But they did not linger. Nobody came up afterward and said that something I had done or said had stayed with them.
The acting frame encourages this kind of separation. If you are an actor playing a magician, your job is to convince the audience that the character is real and that the magic is real within the world of the character. But the audience knows you are performing. They know the magic is not “real” in the literal sense. So what you are really asking them to do is play along with a fiction. And audiences will play along — they are polite, they want to be entertained — but playing along is not the same as being genuinely moved.
The Storyteller Alternative
The storyteller frame operates differently. A storyteller is not pretending to be someone else. A storyteller is themselves, telling you something. The story might involve fiction, fantasy, impossibility — but the teller is real. Their voice is their own voice. Their perspective is their own perspective. Their emotional connection to the material is genuine, not performed.
When I shifted from thinking of myself as “an actor playing a magician” to “a storyteller telling the story of why impossible things happen,” the glass wall started to dissolve.
The shift was subtle at first. I stopped trying to project “magician energy” — whatever I thought that was — and started simply talking to the audience about things I found genuinely fascinating. The psychology of attention. The strangeness of certainty collapsing when something impossible happens right in front of you. My own journey from skeptic to someone who voluntarily stands on stages and asks people to watch closely.
I stopped performing at the audience and started sharing with them. The effects were the same. The techniques had not changed. But the frame around them — the context, the intention, the relationship between me and the room — had shifted from theatrical presentation to personal narrative.
What Changes When You Tell Instead of Act
Several things change when you adopt the storyteller frame, and they are worth naming specifically because they affect practical decisions about how you script, rehearse, and perform.
First, your language changes. An actor playing a magician says things like “Observe — nothing in my hands” and “Watch closely as the impossible occurs.” A storyteller says things like “Here is the part where I always get nervous” and “I have shown this to hundreds of people and it surprises me every single time.” The first register is theatrical. The second is conversational. The first creates distance. The second creates intimacy. Both are valid choices for certain performers and certain contexts, but the storytelling register connects faster and deeper with contemporary audiences who are wired to detect and resist artifice.
Second, your relationship to mistakes changes. When an actor makes a mistake, it breaks the illusion. The character cracks, and the audience sees the machinery behind it. When a storyteller encounters an unexpected moment, it becomes part of the story. “Well, that was not supposed to happen — but let me tell you, this is exactly what it felt like the first time I practiced this in a hotel room in Linz at two in the morning.” The mistake does not break the narrative. It enriches it. It makes the storyteller more human and the story more real.
Third, your relationship to your own material changes. An actor can perform someone else’s script convincingly because acting is about inhabiting a role, not about personal ownership of the material. A storyteller needs to own the story. They need to know why it matters to them. They need to feel it. This means a storyteller cannot borrow someone else’s routine wholesale and perform it with the same presentation. They have to find their own angle, their own connection, their own reason for telling this particular story. Which is harder, but which produces performances that feel authentic rather than reproduced.
The Question That Unlocked It
The question that helped me most was not “What character am I playing?” but rather “Why am I telling this story?”
For each effect in my repertoire, I asked: why does this matter to me? Not why is it a good trick. Not why will the audience enjoy it. Why does it matter to me, Felix, the person who will be standing there telling this story?
For a mentalism piece I perform, the answer was: because the idea that our thoughts are less private than we believe genuinely fascinates and slightly unnerves me. I am not acting fascinated. I am fascinated. And when I share that fascination with the audience — when I tell them honestly that this principle keeps me up at night, that it makes me question assumptions I used to take for granted — they feel the authenticity. They lean in. Not because I am performing well, but because I am sharing something real.
For a card effect, the answer was: because this was the first thing I learned that made me feel like I was capable of surprising people. I was a grown man, a consultant, someone who spent his professional life being serious and analytical. And suddenly I could make someone’s jaw drop with a deck of cards. The delight of that discovery is the story. The technical method is just how the story ends.
When you know why you are telling the story, the telling becomes natural. You are not reciting a script. You are sharing an experience. The script exists — you still need one, for precision and reliability — but it flows from genuine intent rather than theatrical obligation.
The Hybrid Position
I want to be fair to Robert-Houdin. His quote was revolutionary in its time. He was pushing back against a tradition of conjurers who were pure technicians — demonstrators of manual skill with no theatrical consciousness. By saying “you are an actor,” he was insisting on artistry, intention, and craft beyond mere dexterity. That was a necessary corrective, and it elevated the entire art form.
But I think the corrective has been overcorrected. Many magicians have internalized the acting metaphor so deeply that they approach every performance as a theatrical production in which they play a character who happens to perform magic. And for some performers — those with genuine theatrical training, those who build elaborate persona-driven shows — this works beautifully. I have seen character-based magic that was astonishing precisely because the theatrical frame was so complete.
For most of us, though — and certainly for me, an adult who came to this from another career, who performs primarily in corporate and keynote contexts, who has no formal acting training — the storyteller frame is more honest and more effective. I am not playing a character. I am being myself, talking about things I care about, and along the way, impossible things happen. The impossibility is woven into the narrative, not presented as a theatrical event requiring a theatrical frame.
Pete McCabe captures something adjacent to this in Scripting Magic when he writes about the difference between “patter” and “script.” Patter is meaningless chatter that fills the space while you do things. A script is intentional communication that serves the performance. In the same way, acting is performing a role that frames the magic, while storytelling is sharing a narrative that the magic inhabits. The magic lives inside the story, not on top of it.
The Practical Test
Here is how I test whether I am in storytelling mode or acting mode: I ask myself whether I would tell this story to a friend over coffee. Not perform it. Tell it. If the answer is yes — if the story is something I would genuinely share with someone I care about, in my own voice, with my own words — then I am in storytelling territory. If the answer is no — if the story only works when wrapped in theatrical presentation, when delivered with a performer’s cadence and a performer’s gestures — then I am acting, and the audience will sense the difference.
This does not mean performances should be casual or unrehearsed. The opposite. A story told well requires enormous craft — pacing, structure, emotional arc, precise language, physical cues that amplify the narrative. But the craft serves the truth of the story rather than the construction of a character. The craft is invisible. The story is visible. The magic is experienced.
Robert-Houdin gave us a useful metaphor for his century. I think our century needs a different one. Not an actor playing a part. A person standing in front of other people, telling a true story about impossible things, and inviting them to feel what it feels like when the impossible happens right in front of you.
That is not acting. That is something older, something deeper, something that does not require a stage or a costume or a character.
That is storytelling. And the magic lives inside it.