There is a moment that I am deeply embarrassed about, and I need to tell you about it because it taught me the most important lesson I have learned about performing.
It was early in my performing life. A corporate event in Linz. About eighty people. I was doing a card effect where the audience member’s selected card appeared in an unexpected location. The routine was well-rehearsed. The method was clean. And at the moment of the reveal — the moment when the card appeared where it should not have been — I did what I thought a magician should do. I acted surprised.
I widened my eyes. I stepped back slightly. I said, “Wait — is that your card?” in a tone of calculated astonishment.
And it fell completely flat.
Not the trick. The trick worked. The card was in the right place. The audience registered the impossibility. But my reaction — my supposed surprise at my own magic — read as hollow. Artificial. Performed. The audience could tell, in some animal way that bypasses conscious thought, that I was not actually surprised. I was pretending to be surprised. And pretending is not acting.
I did not understand the distinction between acting and pretending until much later, when I encountered it articulated in the work of Derren Brown and in McCabe’s discussions of Stanislavski’s approach. The distinction is simple to state and extraordinarily difficult to implement.
The Distinction
Pretending is what children do. It operates on the surface. You make the face of the emotion without feeling the emotion. You widen your eyes because surprised people widen their eyes. You gasp because surprised people gasp. You step back because surprised people step back. Every external signal of surprise is present, and the internal state is completely absent.
Acting — real acting, in the Stanislavski tradition — is fundamentally different. It begins on the inside. Instead of replicating the external signs of an emotion, you create the internal conditions that generate the emotion organically. The eyes widen not because you are performing widened eyes, but because something has genuinely captured your attention. The gasp comes not because you are producing a gasp, but because something has genuinely shifted in your understanding.
The tool that Stanislavski developed for this is what he called the “Magic If.” Instead of trying to feel surprised, you ask yourself: “What would I do IF this were really happening?” Not “how should I look if I were surprised.” But “if a card truly, genuinely, impossibly appeared in this location right now — what would I actually do?”
The answers are often unexpected. You might not gasp at all. You might go very still. You might laugh. You might look at the audience with an expression that says “Did you see that?” You might pick up the card and turn it over slowly, studying it, as though you cannot quite believe what you are looking at.
These responses are more varied, more specific, and more human than the generic “surprise face” that most performers deploy. And because they arise from genuine internal engagement with the imaginary circumstance, they read as authentic to the audience.
Why Audiences Can Tell
I have thought a great deal about why audiences can detect the difference between acting and pretending. The science, as far as I understand it from Gustav Kuhn’s work on the psychology of magic and from general research on nonverbal communication, suggests several mechanisms.
The first is micro-expression timing. When you genuinely experience an emotion, the facial expression begins before you are consciously aware of it. The surprise registers in the muscles around the eyes and mouth fractionally before your conscious mind processes what has happened. When you are pretending, the sequence is reversed — the conscious decision to look surprised comes first, and the facial muscles engage afterward. This reversal is detectable. Not consciously, usually. But the audience perceives something slightly off, slightly delayed, slightly constructed.
The second is muscular coherence. A genuine emotional state engages the entire face and body in a coordinated pattern. Real surprise affects the eyes, the mouth, the eyebrows, the shoulders, the hands, the posture, and the breathing simultaneously. Pretend surprise typically engages only the most obvious features — the eyes and the mouth — while the rest of the body remains in its previous state. The audience perceives an emotion that is happening only in part of the person, which reads as incomplete.
The third is duration. Genuine emotional responses have a natural arc — they peak and decay at rates that feel organic. Pretend emotional responses either hold too long (because the performer is sustaining the expression deliberately) or cut too short (because the performer has already moved on mentally to the next phase).
All of this adds up to an instinctive judgment that the audience makes in milliseconds: this person is either feeling something or performing something. The judgment is made below the level of conscious analysis, which is why audiences can never quite explain how they know. They just know.
My Journey with the Magic If
After that embarrassing night in Linz, I started working with Stanislavski’s Magic If in my hotel room practice sessions. The practice looked simple but felt deeply strange.
I would perform a routine — let us say a prediction effect. I would go through all the steps: the prediction is written, the choices are made, the prediction is opened. And at the moment of the reveal, instead of performing surprise, I would ask myself: “If I genuinely could predict the future, and this prediction genuinely matched, what would I feel?”
The answer was not surprise. I would not be surprised by my own abilities. What I would feel is satisfaction. A quiet, deep satisfaction that my gift — this impossible, inexplicable ability to know what will happen before it happens — has worked once again. I would feel the pleasure of sharing something remarkable with people who are experiencing it for the first time.
This reframing changed my reaction entirely. Instead of wide eyes and “Wait, is that your card?” I now have a moment of stillness, followed by a slow turn of the prediction toward the audience, followed by a look that says, “I knew. And now you know too.” The emotional state is genuine — I am accessing real satisfaction, real pleasure in sharing something — and the audience reads it as authentic.
For my mentalism pieces, the Magic If produces different results. When I am apparently reading someone’s thoughts, the genuine question is: “If I could really do this — if I could genuinely perceive what someone is thinking — what would that feel like?” The answer, for me, is concentration followed by uncertainty followed by growing confidence followed by revelation. This is a much more interesting emotional journey than the flat certainty that many mentalists project. And because it mirrors the actual emotional journey of attempting something difficult, it reads as real.
The Conviction Problem
Derren Brown discusses a related concept that he calls conviction. The idea is that the performer must believe, genuinely believe, in the reality of what they are presenting — not believe that they have real magical powers, but believe in the story, the moment, the emotional truth of the performance.
This is the hardest part. Because when you are a strategy consultant who learned card tricks in hotel rooms, part of you knows, at all times, that this is an illusion. Part of you is tracking the method, managing the technique, monitoring the audience’s sightlines. And that part of you — the analytical, monitoring part — is fundamentally incompatible with genuine emotional engagement.
The solution, as far as I have found one, is compartmentalization. There is a part of me that manages the technique. It operates below conscious awareness, the same way a concert pianist’s fingers manage the notes while their conscious mind engages with the music. And there is a part of me that inhabits the character — the performance version of Felix who genuinely believes, for the duration of this moment, that something extraordinary is happening.
Training this compartmentalization took time. In the early stages, I could do one or the other but not both. I could manage the technique and project a flat, emotionally disengaged presentation. Or I could engage emotionally and fumble the technique. The integration — technique running on autopilot while emotion runs in the foreground — came only through extensive practice and repeated performance.
The Mirror Test
Here is a practice exercise that helped me more than anything else, and I do it regularly in hotel rooms to this day.
I perform a routine in front of a mirror, but instead of watching my hands (which is what most magicians do when they practice in a mirror), I watch only my face. I do not care whether the sleight is invisible. I care whether the emotion is visible.
At the moment of the reveal, is my face showing genuine engagement with the moment? Or is it showing the mask of performed emotion? Can I see the difference? Can I feel the difference?
The difference, once you learn to see it, is stark. The performed emotion looks like a still photograph of an emotion — fixed, held, posed. The genuine emotion looks like weather — shifting, dynamic, alive. It moves across the face in waves rather than sitting on it like a stamp.
I practice until the mirror shows me weather rather than photographs. Then I record the practice and watch it back. Then I perform and watch the recording. The feedback loop is constant and unforgiving, and it has been the single most effective training tool for developing authentic emotional expression in my performances.
Why This Matters More in Magic
In theater, the audience accepts the convention that actors are playing characters. They know the person on stage is not really Hamlet. The emotional authenticity of the performance is judged within this accepted frame.
In magic, there is no such frame. The audience is watching you, the actual person, apparently doing something impossible. They are trying to determine what is real and what is not. And every micro-signal you send — every facial expression, every vocal inflection, every physical response — is evidence in their ongoing investigation.
If your emotional responses are fake, the audience adds that to their evidence pile. They think: his surprise is fake, therefore the magic is probably fake too. Not consciously. But the impression forms. The overall experience is diminished because the emotional layer of the performance reads as manufactured.
If your emotional responses are genuine — genuinely accessed through the Magic If, genuinely felt in the moment, genuinely expressed through your face and body — the audience’s evidence pile works in your favor. They think: his response feels real, therefore the experience feels real. The magic becomes more magical because the person performing it appears to be genuinely engaged with the impossibility of what is happening.
This is why acting, real acting, matters more in magic than in perhaps any other performing art. Because in magic, the authenticity of the performer’s emotional state is not just an aesthetic choice. It is part of the effect.
What I Stopped Doing
The biggest change I made was to stop performing emotions I do not feel. If I am not surprised by the outcome of a trick — and I should not be, because I caused it — I do not pretend to be surprised. Instead, I find the emotion that I genuinely feel in that moment and express that.
Sometimes it is satisfaction. Sometimes it is delight in the audience’s reaction. Sometimes it is a quiet, almost private moment of wonder at the elegance of the method that made this moment possible — not the method itself, which must never be revealed, but the fact that such elegant constructions exist in the world.
Whatever the emotion, it is real. It is accessed through the Magic If. It is expressed naturally, without the forced amplification of pretending. And it lands with the audience in a way that no amount of performed surprise ever could.
Acting is not pretending. The audience knows the difference. And in magic, where everything hangs on the question of what is real and what is not, that difference is everything.