There is a scene in The Silence of the Lambs that I have thought about more than almost any scene in any film, and it has nothing to do with violence.
Hannibal Lecter is standing in his cell. He is calm. His posture is relaxed. His voice is measured, almost courteous. He is asking Clarice Starling about her childhood, and the way he asks is polite, conversational, the manner of a thoughtful host offering a guest tea. He is behind glass. He cannot reach her. He is the one imprisoned.
And yet the entire scene is terrifying.
Not because of what Lecter does, but because of what he does not do. Every line of dialogue, every shift of Anthony Hopkins’s eyes, every modulation of his eerily gentle voice communicates one thing: there is something vast and dangerous beneath this surface, and it is being deliberately held in check. The restraint is the threat. The calmness is the weapon. What you do not see is infinitely more frightening than what you do.
I had watched that film many times before I encountered the same idea applied to performance. It was in Derren Brown’s Absolute Magic, and when I read it, the connection was so immediate and so clear that I set the book down and stared at the wall for a while.
The Principle of Withheld Power
Brown’s argument is this: the grandeur of performance should be withheld — felt rather than seen. The more you hold back, the more the audience feels it. The more you push it to the surface, the more it becomes caricature.
He uses the Hannibal Lecter analogy explicitly. Hopkins is terrifying not because he screams and rages — that would be a B-movie villain, a figure you can dismiss because his menace is external and therefore containable. Hopkins is terrifying because the screaming and raging are implied, held somewhere behind those calm eyes, and you cannot contain what you cannot see. The audience’s imagination fills in the details, and the details the imagination provides are always worse — always more powerful, always more personal — than anything the film could show you.
This is the principle of withholding, and it applies to magic with a force that took me years to fully understand.
The Overstatement Problem
When I started performing, I did what most new performers do. I tried to make every moment as big as possible. The reveals were dramatic. The gestures were expansive. The vocal delivery was emphatic. I wanted the audience to know, at every moment, that something extraordinary was happening.
This is the instinct. It is also wrong.
Because here is what happens when you overstate your powers: the audience questions them. When a performer announces, through volume and gesture and verbal emphasis, that what he is about to do is incredible, the audience’s critical faculty activates immediately. They cross their arms. They narrow their eyes. They think: prove it. The bold statement has become a challenge, and now the performer must deliver on a promise that he himself inflated beyond what any trick can sustain.
I remember a specific moment at a corporate event in Vienna, maybe eighteen months into performing regularly. I was introducing a mentalism piece, and I had scripted what I thought was an impressive buildup. I talked about the power of the subconscious mind. I mentioned psychological principles. I set up the premise with grand, sweeping language designed to make the audience feel that they were about to witness something profound.
The effect worked. The method was clean. The reveal was strong.
And the audience response was: “That was clever.”
Clever. The word that Derren Brown identifies as the death knell of magic. “You’re very clever” means the audience experienced intellectual puzzlement, not wonder. It means they were outside the magic, watching a demonstration of skill, evaluating your competence. They were not inside the experience. They were not shaken. They were impressed in the way you are impressed by someone who solves a crossword puzzle quickly — admiringly, but without any sense that the world has shifted.
My grand buildup had set the frame wrong. By announcing the power, I had reduced the magic to a demonstration. And a demonstration, no matter how clean, is fundamentally a display of skill, not an experience of impossibility.
The Shift to Understatement
The shift happened gradually, over many performances, but I can trace it to a single decision I made after reading Brown.
I decided to stop announcing what I could do.
Instead of telling the audience that something incredible was about to happen, I would simply do it. Instead of building up the premise with sweeping claims about psychology and the subconscious, I would let the effect speak for itself. Instead of performing with the energy of someone who wants you to know he is doing something difficult, I would perform with the calm of someone for whom this is simply how the world works.
The results were startling.
When I stopped announcing the power and simply embodied it, the audience’s response changed character entirely. Instead of “that was clever,” I started getting silence. Not bad silence — the kind of silence that precedes applause, the silence of people processing something they did not expect and cannot explain. The silence of people whose critical faculty had not been activated because I had not given it anything to push against.
Overstatement triggers resistance. Understatement bypasses it.
Why This Works Psychologically
Think about the people in your life who genuinely intimidate you. Not the loud ones. Not the ones who tell you how important they are, how much they know, how powerful their position is. Those people are easy to dismiss precisely because they are working so hard to convince you. The effort is visible, and visible effort suggests insecurity.
The people who genuinely intimidate you are the quiet ones. The ones who listen more than they speak. The ones who respond to provocation with a slight smile rather than escalation. The ones who, when they do speak, say something precise and considered rather than something loud and emphatic. The ones who seem to have something vast behind their eyes that they choose not to display.
This is the Lecter principle applied to real life, and everyone has experienced it.
The psychological mechanism is straightforward. When someone displays power overtly, you can measure it. You can evaluate it against your own power, against your expectations, against your experience. You can judge whether their display is proportionate or exaggerated. The display gives you a frame of reference, and a frame of reference gives you control.
When someone withholds power, you cannot measure it. You cannot evaluate what you cannot see. Your imagination fills the gap, and your imagination — unconstrained by evidence — will almost always provide something larger, more dangerous, more impressive than the reality. The withholding takes away your frame of reference, and without a frame of reference, you have no control.
This is why Lecter is terrifying. This is why the best mentalists are unsettling. And this is why the performer who says the least about his abilities communicates the most about them.
How I Apply This Now
In practice, the principle of withheld power has changed three specific aspects of how I perform.
First, my introductions. I used to introduce my mentalism pieces with explanations of what I was about to do. Now I introduce them with almost nothing. “I’d like to try something.” That is often enough. No explanation of the premise. No claims about what is possible. Just a quiet statement of intent and then the work itself. The audience does not know what to expect, which means they cannot pre-evaluate it, which means their critical faculty remains dormant until the impossible moment arrives — and by then it is too late to be skeptical.
Second, my physical presence during moments of impossibility. I used to perform reveals with emphasis — a gesture, a vocal exclamation, a pause designed to underline the magnitude of what had just happened. Now I perform reveals with calm. Sometimes I barely react at all. I let the spectator react. I let the audience react. And my calmness in the face of the impossible communicates, more powerfully than any gesture could, that this is not a demonstration of skill but a natural consequence of something the audience does not understand. The restraint says: this is real. And the audience, deprived of the theatrical cues that would tell them it is a performance, begins to wonder if perhaps it is.
Third, my response to skepticism. When someone in the audience challenges what I am doing — “He must have a hidden camera” or “She must be a plant” — I used to feel the need to address it, to defend the reality of the effect. Now I say nothing. Or I smile slightly. Or I simply continue. The non-response is itself a response, and it communicates something far more powerful than any defense: I do not need you to believe me. What happened, happened. Your disbelief changes nothing.
That last one is the purest expression of withheld power I have found. The performer who does not need your belief is more convincing than the performer who desperately seeks it.
The Spectrum of Performance
Brown describes a spectrum of performer types, and it clarified something I had been sensing but could not articulate.
At one end: the performer who trivializes magic. He treats it as amusement, performs it carelessly, communicates through his manner that what he is doing is lightweight, inconsequential, just a bit of fun. The audience responds accordingly — they are amused, briefly, and then they forget.
At the other end: the performer who over-dramatizes magic. He treats it as profound, performs with solemn intensity, communicates through his manner that what he is doing is deeply significant and that you should be in awe. The audience responds to this with discomfort, because solemnity demands a level of buy-in that most audiences are not prepared to give to a man with a deck of cards.
In the middle — the place Brown argues we should aim for — is the performer whose dramatic sensibility is held subtly beneath the surface. He takes what he does seriously. He has depth. He has vision. But he does not demand that you acknowledge any of this. He communicates it through restraint, through precision, through the calm confidence of someone who knows exactly what he is doing and does not need to tell you about it.
The audience feels the depth. They sense the seriousness. But because it is not being pushed at them, because it arrives through implication rather than declaration, they accept it without resistance. It becomes part of the atmosphere of the performance rather than an explicit claim that triggers evaluation.
The Universal Application
I have found this principle equally powerful in my consulting work and keynote speaking. The presenters who command the most attention in a boardroom are rarely the loudest. They are the ones who speak least, listen most, and when they do contribute, do so with quiet precision. The executives who genuinely intimidate their peers are not the ones who talk about their accomplishments — they are the ones who let their track record speak through the quality of their current work.
Withholding is a form of communication. It is the communication of things too large to be stated, too deep to be displayed, too real to need announcement. It is the suggestion that what you see on the surface is a fraction of what exists beneath it.
And in magic — in any form of performance — it is the most powerful tool available. Because the audience will always imagine more than you can show them. The power they attribute to you in the absence of information will always exceed the power you could demonstrate.
Hold it back. Let them feel it. Let them wonder what else is there.
The restraint is the magic.