I bought a black shirt. A really good black shirt — slim fit, matte buttons, the kind of thing you see mentalists wear on television when they are doing that slow-walk-to-center-stage thing with dramatic lighting and a bass-heavy soundtrack. I paired it with dark trousers and shoes that were slightly too formal for the rest of the outfit. I looked, I thought, like someone who could read your mind.
Then I performed at a corporate event in Vienna wearing this costume, and a colleague who had seen me many times before said something that stopped me cold. “You looked great. But you didn’t look like you.”
She was right. I had assembled the exterior of a character without doing any of the interior work. I had grasped the dress without grasping the soul.
The Gogol Principle
That phrase — “grasp the soul, not the dress” — comes from a line Stanislavski borrowed from the Russian playwright Gogol. The full quote, which I encountered while reading Derren Brown’s Absolute Magic, is: “One should first grasp the soul of a part, not its dress.” Brown uses it to make a devastating argument about how most magicians approach character development. They start with the costume, the props, the music, the walk — all the visible, external elements — and assume the character will follow. But it never works that way. The exterior without the interior is a shell. And audiences can tell the difference between a person and a shell, even if they cannot articulate how.
I had done exactly this. I had started with the black shirt.
The problem with starting from the outside is that every choice you make is arbitrary. Why a black shirt? Because mentalists wear black shirts. Why those shoes? Because they looked professional. Why that music? Because it sounded atmospheric. None of these choices were connected to anything real about me. They were not expressions of my personality, my values, or the kind of magic I wanted to create. They were imitations of choices other performers had made, transplanted onto a different person — me — without any consideration of whether they fit.
Who Are You When You Are Not Performing?
Here is the uncomfortable question that character development actually starts with: who are you when you are not on stage?
Not who do you want to be. Not who do you admire. Who are you, right now, in your ordinary life, when nobody is watching?
I am a strategy consultant who gets excited about frameworks and systems. I am someone who talks with his hands and makes too many analogies. I am someone who gets genuinely fascinated by how things work and cannot help sharing that fascination. I am someone who laughs easily, sometimes at my own observations, and who tends to lean in when a conversation gets interesting. I am not naturally mysterious. I am not naturally brooding. I am not naturally silent and intense.
And yet the character I was trying to build — the black shirt character — was all of those things. Mysterious. Brooding. Silent and intense. I was trying to become someone I was not, because I thought that was what a mentalist was supposed to be.
Brown’s process for developing a performance character begins not with aspirations but with honest self-assessment. Sit with someone who knows you well. Ask them to describe your social character — the version of you that shows up at dinner parties, in work meetings, in casual conversation. Listen without defensiveness. Write down what they say. Then look at those descriptions and ask: which of these traits are most conducive to the kind of magic I want to perform?
This is a radically different starting point than “What should I wear?” It says: the raw material for your character is already inside you. Your job is not to invent a character from scratch but to identify the parts of your existing personality that serve performance, and then theatrically enhance them — exaggerate them slightly, give them more room to breathe, turn up the volume on the traits that make you compelling and turn down the ones that get in the way.
Theatrically Enhanced, Not Invented
There is an enormous difference between enhancement and invention. Enhancement takes something real and makes it more vivid. Invention creates something from nothing.
When I stopped trying to be the mysterious mentalist and started thinking about what was actually true about me, the character that emerged was completely different — and completely natural. I am genuinely curious about psychology and perception. That is real. I can lean into that curiosity on stage, ask real questions, share genuine fascination with the phenomena I am demonstrating. That comes across as authentic because it is authentic. It is me, turned up a notch.
I am a consultant by training, which means I think in frameworks and I enjoy explaining how systems work. On stage, that translates into a natural teaching energy — not lecturing, but sharing. “Here is something I find fascinating about how your brain processes information.” That is not a script line I memorized from someone else’s act. That is how I actually talk at dinner.
I am not intimidating. I am not dark. I am warm and curious and sometimes a little nerdy about the things that interest me. And when I stopped fighting that and started working with it, the performances got better immediately. Not because the tricks changed. Because the person doing the tricks finally showed up.
The Continuity Test
The best performers in any discipline show continuity between their offstage and onstage selves. They are recognizably the same person in both contexts. The stage version is heightened, polished, more focused — but it is the same person. You would recognize them at a coffee shop. Their sense of humor is the same. Their energy is the same. Their way of relating to people is the same.
This continuity is what makes an audience trust you. When there is a gap between who you appear to be on stage and who you actually are, the audience senses it as inauthenticity. They may not be able to name it — they will not say “this person’s character is incongruent with his personality.” But they will feel something off. A distance. A performance quality that keeps them at arm’s length instead of pulling them in.
I think about this often at corporate events, where I perform alongside keynote speakers and facilitators. The ones who connect most powerfully with the room are always the ones who seem like they would be just as interesting to talk to during the coffee break. Their stage presence is an amplified version of their coffee-break presence. There is no seam between the two.
When I was wearing the black shirt and doing the slow-walk-to-center-stage, there was a seam. A big one. The person the audience met on stage bore very little resemblance to the person they would meet at the coffee break afterward. That gap undermined everything I was trying to do.
Material Follows Character, Not the Other Way Around
Once you know who you are on stage — once you have grasped the soul — the dress follows naturally. And so does the material.
This is the part of the process that I got backwards for much longer than I would like to admit. I chose effects first, then tried to find a character that could perform them. I saw a mentalism routine I admired, learned it, and then tried to become the kind of performer who could pull it off. This is exactly backwards. The character should determine the material, not the other way around.
When I finally accepted that my natural performance character was curious, warm, and slightly nerdy about psychology, certain effects fell away immediately. The dark, intense mindreading routines that I had been trying to force into my act simply did not fit. They required a character I was not. Other effects — ones I had previously dismissed as too lighthearted or too interactive — suddenly made perfect sense. They fit the person I actually am.
Your character is a filter. Everything passes through it. Music selection, prop design, scripting, audience interaction style — all of it should be consistent with the character, and the character should be consistent with you. When all of these elements align, the performance has a quality that is hard to describe but immediately felt. It feels whole. It feels like one thing, not a collection of parts.
The Inside-Out Practice
I now do a character check before working on any new piece of material. Before I think about method, before I think about scripting, before I think about staging, I ask: does this fit who I am on stage? Would this piece feel natural coming from me? Would it surprise my friends to see me perform this, or would they think, “Yes, that is exactly what Felix would do”?
If the answer is that it would surprise them — that it requires a version of me that does not exist — I put it aside. Not because it is a bad effect, but because it is a bad effect for me. Someone else might do it beautifully. I would do it as a performance, a put-on, and the audience would feel the seam.
This filter has eliminated a lot of material from consideration. It has also saved me from spending weeks learning and rehearsing effects that would never have worked in my hands, not because of technical difficulty but because of character mismatch. The hours I used to waste on effects that did not fit are now spent on effects that do — and the return on that investment is incomparably higher.
The Black Shirt Epilogue
I still own the black shirt. I wear it sometimes, to dinners or events where it is appropriate. It is a nice shirt. But I do not perform in it anymore.
My performance wardrobe now looks like a slightly better version of what I wear in my professional life. A well-fitted jacket. A shirt in a color I would actually choose. Shoes that are polished but not theatrical. I look like a strategy consultant who is about to show you something interesting — which is, as it turns out, exactly what I am.
The soul came first. The dress followed. And everything that comes out of that alignment — every word, every gesture, every effect — carries something that the black shirt never could.
It carries me.