Ned

Some performers spend a career learning how to hold a room. Ned has spent thirty years learning what to do once he has it.

Trained at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where he earned his Masters in Classical Acting, Ned built his career on stages across the United States and the United Kingdom. From the Lyric Opera to houses across the country and abroad, he developed something that cannot be taught in any conservatory: an instinct for the moment a room shifts, and the skill to lead it somewhere it did not expect to go.

That career has crossed disciplines — stage, film, television, voice — but the through line has always been the same: an audience in a seat, a story worth telling, and the question of what happens next.

Eventually, that instinct led him somewhere unexpected.

Mentalism found Ned. Or perhaps the better way to say it is that Ned found the discipline that finally matched what he had always been doing: reading people, understanding what they need before they say it, and giving an audience the particular pleasure of believing in something.

Ned is a member of the Academy of Magical Arts and the International Brotherhood of Magicians, and can often be found around the Magic Castle in Hollywood.

His show is dark cabaret built around a simple premise: wonder is not a children’s thing. The best illusions are the ones that leave you thinking rather than merely applauding. A good performer does not ask you to suspend disbelief. He makes disbelief feel like the harder option.

Ned lives in Los Angeles, which suits him. The city rewards people who are not what they first appear.