“Un prestidigitateur n’est point un jongleur; c’est un acteur jouant le rôle de magicien.”
A magician is not a juggler; he is an actor playing the part of a magician.
Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin wrote this in the nineteenth century, and it has become perhaps the most frequently quoted sentence in all of magic literature. You find it in books, on lecture notes, on magic forum signatures, on the walls of magic clubs. It is the quote that every magician knows, the quote that every magician nods at, and the quote that almost no magician actually follows.
For years, I treated this quote the way most people treat it: as a definition. As a statement about what magic is. A philosophical position. A nice thing to put on a poster.
Then I read Pete McCabe’s framing of it in Scripting Magic, and something shifted. McCabe makes the point that this quote is not a definition at all. It is practical advice. It is not telling you what a magician is. It is telling you what a magician should do. And what a magician should do, according to the father of modern magic, is study acting.
Unless you actually have magical powers, you are only acting as though you do. If you want to be a better magician, you need to improve your acting skills.
It is that simple. And it changed everything about how I approach my craft.
Why I Resisted
I came to magic as an adult, from a career in strategy consulting. My entry point was technical. I bought a deck of cards and online video tutorials from ellusionist.com, sat in hotel rooms across Austria, and learned by watching, rewinding, and practicing hand movements until they looked smooth. My focus was entirely on what my hands were doing.
This is typical of adult learners in magic. We approach it as a skill acquisition problem. Master this move. Learn this technique. Perfect this sequence. The assumption is that if the technical execution is good enough, the magic will take care of itself. The audience will be fooled because the method is invisible. The effect will be powerful because the method is clean.
This assumption is wrong, but it takes a long time to discover that it is wrong, because in the early stages, technical improvement does produce better results. A cleaner execution does create a better audience experience. So you double down on technique, convinced that this is the path.
It was not until I started performing regularly — first small groups, then corporate events, then keynotes — that I began to sense the gap. My techniques were solid. My routines were well-constructed. But something was missing. The performances felt competent but not compelling. The audience was impressed but not moved. They said things like “That was really clever” rather than “That was incredible.”
When I tried to diagnose the problem, I kept coming back to the same conclusion: there was nothing wrong with the magic. The gap was in the person performing it.
The Actor’s Toolkit
Robert-Houdin’s advice, once you take it as practical rather than philosophical, leads to an obvious question: if I should study acting, what should I study?
The answer, I have discovered over several years of pursuing this question, is surprisingly specific. Actors study a definable set of skills. Voice projection and control. Physical presence and movement. Emotional access and expression. Character development and maintenance. Script analysis and interpretation. Audience awareness and response. Timing.
Every single one of these skills is directly relevant to magic performance. And almost none of them are taught in the magic books and videos that most magicians learn from. We learn techniques. We learn routines. We learn scripted patter. But we do not learn how to project our voice across a room without shouting. We do not learn how to use our body to communicate status, emotion, or intention. We do not learn how to access genuine emotion on demand. We do not learn how to analyze a script for subtext and motivation.
I did not know any of this when I started. I learned card sleights. I memorized scripts. I practiced in hotel rooms. And I performed like a consultant doing card tricks, which is exactly what I was.
The Missing Piece
The realization that acting training was the missing piece in my development came gradually, through a series of experiences that individually seemed minor but cumulatively pointed in the same direction.
The first was watching a recording of myself performing at a corporate event in Vienna. In the recording, there is a moment where the effect works perfectly — the audience’s selection matches my prediction — and I watch myself announce the result with all the emotional range of someone reading aloud from an insurance form. The words were right. The reveal was clean. But there was nothing in my voice, my face, or my body that communicated the wonder of what had just happened.
The second was attending a theater performance in Graz — a small production, nothing elaborate — and watching the actors create genuine emotional moments with nothing more than their voices and their presence. No special effects. No elaborate sets. Just people, in a room, making other people feel things through the quality of their performance. I left that theater thinking: that is what I am missing.
The third was a conversation with Adam Wilber, who told me something I have never forgotten: “You are doing the tricks to the audience. You need to do the tricks for the audience. And the difference between to and for is acting.”
What I Did About It
Once I accepted that acting training was the missing piece, I had a practical problem: I am a strategy consultant and startup founder, not a drama school student. I do not have the time or the inclination to enroll in a full acting program. I needed targeted training that addressed the specific skills relevant to my performances.
I took a two approaches. The first was classes — not a full acting course, but workshops focused on specific skills. I took a voice and presence workshop in Vienna that taught me about breath support, projection, and the relationship between physical posture and vocal quality. I took improv classes that taught me about presence, responsiveness, and audience interaction. I attended a storytelling workshop that taught me about narrative arc, emotional beats, and the pacing of a spoken story.
The second approach was self-study, using the same systematic method I had used to learn magic technique. I read acting texts — not all of them, but the ones most frequently referenced in the magic books I trusted. I watched interviews with actors discussing their craft. I studied performances by people I admired, not for what they were doing but for how they were doing it.
And I practiced. In the same hotel rooms where I had practiced card sleights, I now practiced vocal exercises. I practiced standing in front of the bathroom mirror and delivering lines with different emotional intentions — the same words, but spoken with curiosity, with wonder, with frustration, with joy. I practiced the physical transitions between emotions — how do you shift from playful to serious without losing the audience? I practiced holding silence, which is one of the hardest things for someone who is used to filling every moment with words.
The Specific Skills That Mattered Most
After several years of this work, I can identify the acting skills that have had the most direct impact on my performances as a magician.
Vocal variety. The ability to change the pitch, pace, and volume of my voice to match the emotional content of what I am saying. A revelation delivered at the same pitch and pace as the setup is a revelation that does not land. The voice needs to shift to signal that something important is happening.
Physical presence. The ability to command a space with my body — not through large, theatrical gestures, but through deliberate, purposeful movement. Standing still when stillness is required. Moving with direction when movement is required. Using the stage rather than being confined to a spot.
Emotional access. The ability to connect with genuine emotion during a performance — not to fake amazement but to find something in the moment that genuinely interests, excites, or moves me, and to let that genuine feeling come through. Audiences detect genuine emotion the way they detect gravity. They do not analyze it. They simply feel it.
Listening. The ability to truly hear what an audience member says, rather than waiting for them to finish so I can deliver my next line. This is an acting skill that most performers in any field underestimate. Genuine listening changes your face, your posture, and your response in ways that no amount of scripting can replicate.
Timing. The ability to hold a pause for exactly as long as it needs to be held. Not a beat shorter, not a beat longer. Timing is not something you can learn from a book. It is learned through performance, through paying attention to audience responses, through developing the internal clock that tells you when a moment has reached its peak and when it has begun to decay.
What Robert-Houdin Actually Meant
I have come to believe that Robert-Houdin, when he wrote that sentence, was not making a philosophical point about the nature of magic. He was solving a practical problem. He was watching performers — the jugglers, the mountebanks, the demonstrators of dexterity who preceded him — and seeing that they were missing something essential. They were showing their skill. They were not creating an experience.
An actor creates an experience. An actor does not simply execute a sequence of actions. An actor inhabits a character who has desires, faces obstacles, and pursues goals within a specific set of circumstances. The audience watches not just what the actor does but who the actor is. The what is the plot. The who is the story.
Robert-Houdin was saying: be the who, not just the what. Your techniques, your methods, your mechanics — those are the what. Your character, your emotional presence, your ability to create a reality in which magic is possible — that is the who. And the who is what the audience will remember.
I am still learning this. I am still a strategy consultant who came to magic as an adult and who practices in hotel rooms. But the gap between the magic I perform and the experience the audience has is narrower now than it was before I took Robert-Houdin’s advice literally.
He was not defining magic. He was giving instructions. And the instruction is clear: if you want to be a better magician, study acting. Not as a theoretical exercise. Not as a philosophical position. As a practical skill that you train, practice, and apply.
The father of modern magic told us exactly what to do. The question is whether we are willing to do it.