There is a moment in the television show Taxi that I have watched more times than I care to admit. It is a flashback episode. The character Reverend Jim Ignatowski — the burned-out, spacey, perpetually confused reverend played by Christopher Lloyd — appears as he was before the drugs. He is in college. He is sharp, focused, articulate. He is an entirely different person. His girlfriend pressures him to lighten up, and he reluctantly takes a bite of a pot brownie. Then he says, with perfect lucidity, “Now can we please go study?”
And then something happens.
A moment passes over his face. His cheeks sink. His jowls drop. His eyes go dim. Christopher Lloyd transforms, right there on camera, from a bright young college student into Reverend Jim. It lasts only a second or two before his face returns to the college version. But in that flash, you realize something staggering: for seventy-five episodes of Taxi, every single second he was on camera, Christopher Lloyd was holding his face that way. He was physically maintaining the character. Not just when he had lines. Not just when the scene demanded it. Every single moment.
I first encountered this observation in Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic, in the interview with Jonathan Levit about acting and magic. McCabe describes this Taxi moment and Levit responds by talking about physicality and commitment — how every aspect of a character, from how they walk to how they handle props to how they deal with the people around them, must be consistent. And that consistency requires a level of commitment that most performers, including most magicians, never achieve.
I read that passage in a hotel room in Linz at about eleven at night, and I set the book down on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling for a long time.
The Consultant Who Cannot Stop Consulting
My problem has always been the opposite of what you might expect. I did not struggle to find a performance character. I struggled to stop being my regular character.
I am, in my daily professional life, a strategy and innovation consultant. This is not a personality I put on. It is who I am. I analyze situations. I assess risks. I identify leverage points. I speak in structured frameworks. I make eye contact in a very specific way — the way you do when you are establishing credibility with a CFO who has heard a lot of pitches this week.
When I first started performing magic at corporate events, I thought I could simply add magic to this existing persona. I was a consultant who also did magic. The magic was the interesting part. The rest of me would remain unchanged.
This is an entirely reasonable assumption, and it is entirely wrong.
What happened was that during my performances, I would oscillate. When I was in the middle of an effect — when the audience was watching closely, when the magical moment was imminent — I would be a performer. My energy would rise. My movements would become more deliberate. My voice would shift into something more theatrical, more present.
But between effects, I would revert. The consultant would come back. My posture would relax into my default. My speech patterns would return to the measured, analytical tone I use in meetings. My energy would drop to conversational level. The audience would see someone who was, for brief moments, a performer, and for the rest of the time, a businessman fumbling with cards.
I did not notice this until Adam Wilber, my co-founder at Vulpine Creations, watched a recording of one of my early keynotes and said something that hit me like a slap: “You keep leaving the stage without actually leaving the stage.”
The In-Between Moments
Jonathan Levit’s point, as relayed in Scripting Magic, is that character commitment means going through every moment of the show and asking, “How would my character do that?” Not just the big moments. Not just the magical moments. Every moment. How would your character bring out the deck? How would your character invite someone to select a card? How would your character react to a joke from the audience?
The reason this hit me so hard is that I had never thought about the in-between moments. The transitions. The dead time between effects when I was resetting or introducing the next piece. These were the moments where my character evaporated.
Think about Christopher Lloyd holding Reverend Jim’s face for seventy-five episodes. He did not let his face relax into his natural expression when the camera cut to another actor. He did not suddenly become Christopher Lloyd during the wide shots. He held the character from the first moment he appeared on screen to the last, whether he had dialogue or not, whether the scene was focused on him or not.
This is the standard. And I was nowhere near it.
The Corporate Event Test
The challenge is amplified enormously in corporate event settings, which is where I do most of my performing. In a theater show, the performance has clear boundaries. The lights go down, the show starts, the show ends, the lights come up. Your character exists within that defined space.
In a corporate event, the boundaries are blurred to the point of being nonexistent. You are visible to the audience during the cocktail hour. You are visible during the dinner. You are visible in the hallway during the break. People approach you before you perform, during the intermission, and after the event while they are putting on their coats. Every one of these moments is a performance moment, whether you intend it to be or not.
I learned this the hard way at a corporate gala in Salzburg. I was performing after the main keynote address. Before my set, during the cocktail reception, I was standing near the bar talking to one of the event organizers about logistics — microphone placement, lighting, timing. I was in full consultant mode. Analytical. Businesslike. Efficient.
A group of attendees recognized me from the event program and came over to say hello. They were excited to see the magic portion of the evening. And they met a consultant discussing sound-check protocols. Whatever mystique or anticipation they had built up deflated slightly in that moment. I could feel it. They were meeting the man behind the curtain before the show had even started.
After that night, I made a rule: from the moment I arrive at the venue, I am in character. Not performing constantly — that would be exhausting and strange. But present. Engaged. Operating in the register of someone who is about to do something remarkable, not someone who is worried about whether the audio guy has the right cable.
What Character Consistency Actually Requires
The hardest part of maintaining character consistency is not the big stuff. It is not your stage voice or your performance posture or your scripted lines. Those are relatively easy to maintain because they have been rehearsed.
The hard part is the micro-moments. How you pick up a glass of water. How you adjust your jacket. How you respond when someone asks you a logistical question. How you walk from one side of the room to the other. How you handle the moment when your microphone feeds back, or the projector dies, or someone’s phone rings loudly during your most important revelation.
In those moments, your default personality rushes in to fill the vacuum. And if your default personality is significantly different from your performance character, the audience sees the seam. They see the person behind the performer. And once they see that seam, they never quite unsee it.
I have been working on this for a long time, and I am still not where I want to be. My consultant self is deeply embedded. He shows up when I am problem-solving on stage, when something goes wrong, when I am adjusting to an unexpected situation. He shows up with his analytical tone and his measured assessment and his tendency to treat challenges as problems to be solved rather than moments to be inhabited.
The shift I have been trying to make is subtle but fundamental: from problem-solving mode to performance mode. When the microphone feeds back, my consultant self wants to diagnose and fix. My performance self needs to react, to use the moment, to let the audience see a character dealing with the unexpected, not a technician troubleshooting.
The Face You Hold
There is a physical dimension to this that I only appreciated after watching that Taxi clip repeatedly. Christopher Lloyd was not just staying in character emotionally or intellectually. He was staying in character physically. His face. His posture. The way he held his hands. The speed of his movements. All of it was calibrated to Reverend Jim, and he maintained it with the discipline of an athlete holding a training position.
I started paying attention to my own physicality between effects. What I discovered was alarming. My shoulders would drop. My head would tilt forward — the posture of someone looking at a laptop, which is my default posture because I spend most of my life looking at a laptop. My hands would fall to my sides in a way that was completely neutral, completely unremarkable, completely devoid of the energy I brought to the performance moments.
The fix was not to adopt some artificially theatrical posture for the entire event. That would be exhausting and, worse, it would look artificial. The fix was to find a physicality that was sustainable, natural, and slightly elevated from my default. A version of my standing posture that was more open, more forward, more engaged. A way of holding my hands that suggested readiness rather than rest. A way of walking that had purpose and direction rather than the ambling shuffle of someone looking for the coffee station.
This is what I mean by character consistency. Not a permanent theatrical performance. A permanent state of presence. The difference between someone who is at an event and someone who is the event.
The Mirror Exercise
Here is the exercise that helped me most, and I offer it to anyone who struggles with the same oscillation between character and default.
Set up your phone to record yourself, not during a performance, but during the gaps between performances. Record yourself arriving at a venue. Record yourself talking to the event planner. Record yourself standing by the stage waiting for your introduction. Record yourself walking back to your table after your set.
Then watch the footage and ask: Would someone who had never met me before know, from watching this footage alone, that I was about to do something extraordinary? Or would they think I was the accountant who drew the short straw for the after-dinner toast?
The first time I watched footage like this, I was genuinely embarrassed. I looked like exactly what I was — a consultant who happens to know some card tricks. Nothing about my physicality, my energy, or my presence suggested that something remarkable was about to happen.
Now I check this footage regularly. It is the most useful mirror I have found.
Seventy-Five Episodes
Christopher Lloyd held a character for seventy-five episodes. Not because anyone would have noticed a single lapse. Not because the director was watching his face in every wide shot. But because that is what commitment looks like. You hold the character because you are the character, and the character does not take breaks.
I am not performing seventy-five episodes. I am performing a forty-five-minute keynote at a corporate event in Graz or a thirty-minute show at a conference in Vienna. But the principle is the same. From the moment I am visible to the moment I am not, the character must hold. Not rigidly. Not theatrically. But consistently.
The consultant can come back later. He always does. But for those hours at the event, from arrival to departure, the performance character gets the stage. All of it. Including the parts that do not feel like performance at all.
Especially those parts.
Because the audience is always watching. Even when you think they are not. Even during the in-between moments. Even when you are picking up a glass of water or adjusting your jacket or walking to the restroom. They are watching. And what they see in those unguarded moments tells them more about who you are than anything you do when you know the spotlight is on.
Christopher Lloyd knew that. For seventy-five episodes, he never forgot it. That is the standard. I am not there yet, but I know what I am aiming for.