There is a line in Derren Brown’s Absolute Magic that I underlined so hard the pen nearly tore through the page. Brown, channeling Stanislavski via Gogol, writes: “One should first grasp the soul of a part, not its dress.”
The dress. The costume. The external trappings. This is where most of us start when we think about our performance character. What should I wear? What style of props should I use? Should I be funny or serious? Loud or quiet? What genre of music should I walk on to? These are dress questions. They are questions about the exterior, about the presentation surface, about what the audience sees before they see anything real.
Brown’s argument, which he builds with the patience and precision of a philosopher building a proof, is that character starts inside. Not with costume but with self-awareness. Not with prop selection but with an honest understanding of who you actually are, what you naturally project, and what qualities you can genuinely amplify on stage without becoming a fraud.
I read this in a hotel room in Vienna, and I realized that I had been approaching my performance character entirely from the outside in. I had been shopping for a character the way you shop for a suit — browsing options, trying things on, checking the mirror. And nothing had fit, because the suit was not the problem. I did not know the body it was supposed to fit.
The Potter’s Approach
The first approach to finding a performance character is what I think of as the Potter’s approach. You start with raw material — a blank lump of clay — and you build up. You add elements: a vocal style from this performer you admire, a comedic sensibility from that one, a dramatic intensity from another, a physical presence you saw at a conference. Layer by layer, you construct a character from components sourced from various inspirations.
This is the approach I tried first, and it is the approach that most beginning performers try, because it feels productive. You can point to progress. Today I added this element. This week I incorporated that influence. This month I developed this character trait. The character grows visibly, and the growth feels like accomplishment.
The problem is that the character you build this way is a composite of other people. It is a collage, not a portrait. Each individual element might be good — the vocal style works, the comedic timing is effective, the dramatic presence is compelling — but the elements do not cohere, because they were not designed to work together. They were designed to work in the contexts of the performers they came from, not in the context of you.
I spent the better part of a year in the Potter’s mode. I studied performers I admired and tried to incorporate their strongest qualities into my own stage presence. I adopted elements of timing from one performer, elements of audience interaction from another, elements of scripting philosophy from a third. Each element was a deliberate choice. Each element was well-researched. And the result was a performance character that felt assembled rather than born. It worked, technically. Audiences responded reasonably well. But there was a quality of inauthenticity that I could feel even when the audience could not articulate it. Something was slightly off. Something rang hollow.
The problem was that I was building from the outside in. I was constructing a character before I understood myself.
The Sculptor’s Approach
The second approach is the Sculptor’s approach. You start not with a blank lump of clay but with a block of marble that already contains a shape within it. Your job is not to add but to subtract. You chip away everything that is not the character, and what remains is the character that was there all along.
Brown describes this process in terms that resonated deeply with me. The first step is self-awareness: understand who you actually are. Not who you want to be. Not who you think the audience wants you to be. Who you are. Your natural communication style, your genuine interests, your default emotional register, your instinctive way of relating to people.
The second step is identification: within the full complexity of who you are, identify the qualities that have theatrical potential. Not every aspect of your personality belongs on stage. The stage amplifies everything, so you need to select the qualities that will amplify well — the ones that become more interesting, more engaging, more compelling when projected to a larger scale.
The third step is what Brown calls “theatrically enhancing” by “relaxing into” those qualities. Not forcing. Not performing. Relaxing. Letting the selected qualities expand naturally, the way a person’s personality expands when they are comfortable and confident and among people they like. The stage character is not an act. It is you, in a state of comfortable amplification.
This description of the process changed everything for me, because it reframed the question. The Potter asks: what character should I build? The Sculptor asks: what character is already inside me, waiting to be revealed?
The Excavation
I started the excavation process the only way I knew how: with analysis. I am a strategy consultant. When I need to understand something, I gather data.
I asked people who know me well — friends, colleagues, my partner — to describe how I come across in social situations. Not on stage. In life. How do I talk? What is my default energy level? What do I naturally gravitate toward in conversation? What makes me light up? What makes me shut down?
The responses were remarkably consistent. I come across as calm, analytical, and genuinely curious. I ask a lot of questions. I listen more than I talk, but when I talk, I tend to be precise and somewhat dry. I have a quiet sense of humor that surfaces unexpectedly — not big, loud jokes, but observations that catch people off guard. I am interested in ideas and in people’s motivations. I am not physically expressive. I do not dominate rooms. I draw people in rather than overwhelming them.
This was useful data, because it described a person I recognized — myself — and it was entirely different from the performance character I had been trying to build. The built character was more energetic than me, more physically expressive, louder, more overtly entertaining. The built character was a good performer. It was just not me.
The real me — calm, curious, analytical, dry — was the raw material. The Sculptor’s question was: which of these qualities has theatrical potential?
Chipping Away
Not everything about your real personality works on stage. Some qualities are too subtle for the performance context. Some are too private. Some are simply not interesting to watch.
But several of my natural qualities turned out to be exactly what I needed.
The curiosity was the first thing I identified. I am genuinely curious about how people think, what motivates their choices, what they notice and what they miss. This curiosity is not a performance pose — it is the reason I got into consulting, the reason I got into magic, and the reason I find mentalism so compelling. On stage, genuine curiosity translates into authentic engagement with the audience. When I ask a spectator what they are thinking, I actually want to know. When I explore a decision-making scenario, I am actually interested in the outcome. The audience can feel the difference between performed curiosity and real curiosity, even if they cannot name it.
The analytical precision was the second quality. I naturally explain things clearly and concisely. I organize ideas logically. I build from premises to conclusions. On stage, this translates into scripts that feel intelligent and structured without feeling academic or cold. The audience follows my reasoning, which means they are engaged cognitively, not just emotionally. And cognitive engagement, I discovered, is a powerful complement to the emotional engagement that the magic provides.
The dry humor was the third quality. I do not tell jokes. I make observations. I notice things that are slightly absurd and point them out with a straight face. This is not a technique I learned — it is how I have always communicated. On stage, it works because it feels natural. The audience does not feel like they are being told jokes. They feel like they are in the company of someone who sees the world with a slight tilt and shares that perspective without trying to be a comedian. The laughs come from recognition, not from punchlines.
The Character That Emerged
The character that emerged from this process was not dramatically different from who I am in real life. That was the point. It was me, with the volume turned up on the qualities that translate to the stage and the volume turned down on the qualities that do not.
On stage, I am a calm, curious, analytically-minded person who is genuinely fascinated by how the mind works and who uses magic as a way of exploring that fascination with the audience. I am not a showman. I am not a comedian. I am not a mysterious figure in a dark suit. I am a person who finds this stuff endlessly interesting and who invites the audience to share in that interest.
This character works because it is true. There is no gap between who I am and who I appear to be. The audience gets an amplified but honest version of the person standing in front of them. And honesty, as Brown argues throughout Absolute Magic, is the foundation of genuine connection with an audience.
The Potter’s approach would have given me a more impressive character — more dynamic, more theatrical, more obviously “performer-like.” But it would have been a costume. The Sculptor’s approach gave me a character that is less immediately dazzling but infinitely more sustainable, because I do not have to remember to be it. I just have to relax into it.
The Relaxation Principle
Brown uses the word “relax” repeatedly in his discussion of character, and I initially thought it was a throwaway — a softer way of saying “be natural.” It is not. Relaxation is the mechanism.
When you are tense on stage — when you are trying to be something you are not, or performing a character you have built rather than discovered — the tension is visible. Your voice is tighter. Your movements are stiffer. Your timing is slightly off. The audience feels the tension even when they cannot see it, because tension is communicated through a thousand micro-signals that bypass conscious perception.
When you are relaxed on stage — when you are being a heightened version of yourself rather than performing a constructed character — the relaxation is equally visible. Your voice is natural. Your movements are fluid. Your timing adjusts organically to the room. The audience feels comfortable, because you are comfortable. And comfort is the precondition for connection.
I noticed this most clearly in the difference between my early performances, where I was trying to be a “performer,” and my later performances, where I was trying to be myself on stage. The early performances were technically competent but energetically tight. The later performances were less polished in some respects but radically more connected. The audience leaned in more. They laughed more easily. They gasped more genuinely. Not because the effects were better — they were the same effects — but because the person performing them was relaxed, and relaxation is contagious.
The Ongoing Process
I do not consider the Sculptor’s work finished. It is an ongoing process of refinement. Each performance teaches me something new about which aspects of my personality amplify well and which ones I should continue to let recede. Each audience interaction reveals nuances I had not noticed. Each hotel room rehearsal session — speaking my scripts aloud, listening to the recording, adjusting the tone — is another pass with the chisel.
But the fundamental insight is settled: the character was always there. It did not need to be built. It needed to be uncovered. The Potter in me wanted to create something impressive from scratch. The Sculptor in me, once I learned to listen, knew that the most impressive thing I could create on stage was an honest, amplified, relaxed version of the person I already am.
Brown was right. Grasp the soul of the part first. The dress follows naturally.