The Suspension of Disbelief: Your Most Powerful Ally — and Your Most Tenuous One
Last week I re-watched WALL-E with my four-year-old.
I cried three separate times.
Over robots. That don't really speak. In a movie I have seen before, that I knew perfectly well was going to make me cry.
And here's the thing — I knew the whole time. I KNEW those were computer-animated images. I knew there was no WALL-E. I knew EVE wasn't real. I knew the entire world I was completely emotionally invested in for 98 minutes... didn't exist.
And yet.
THREE times. Actual tears. In front of my child, who I'm pretty sure now thinks their parent has some kind of robot-related condition.
(I don't. I just have feelings. And Pixar weaponizes them against us every time.)
This phenomenon — this beautiful, mysterious, completely illogical thing that happens when a great story takes hold — has a name. It's been studied by poets, philosophers, filmmakers, and storytellers for centuries.
It is the Suspension of Disbelief.
And as voice actors and puppeteers, it is simultaneously the most powerful ally we have... and the most tenuous one.
Let's talk about it.
Where It All Started — A Poet in 1817
The phrase was coined by the English poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his 1817 work Biographia Literaria: "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." Kidadl
Coleridge was writing about poetry — specifically about how a modern, enlightened audience could still enjoy fantastical literature that included supernatural elements and implausible events. His argument was elegant: if an author could infuse genuine human interest and emotional truth into a story, the reader would willingly agree to set aside their rational objections to the impossible things happening on the page.
Willing. That word is doing enormous work in Coleridge's phrase and I want to come back to it.
Because the audience doesn't HAVE to suspend their disbelief. They CHOOSE to. They arrive at your story — at your performance — already hoping to be taken somewhere. Already leaning in. Already extending the hand of poetic faith.
The question is whether you take it.
Tolkien's Counter-Argument (And Why It Makes It Even Better)
J.R.R. Tolkien — who built perhaps the most elaborately realized fictional world in literary history — actually pushed back on Coleridge's framing in a really useful way.
Tolkien argued: "Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called 'willing suspension of disbelief'. But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator'. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world." Theliteraryscholar
Read that again. Tolkien isn't saying audiences pretend. He's saying that when the storytelling is good enough, the audience doesn't NEED to pretend. They actually ENTER the secondary world. It becomes true to them — internally consistent, emotionally real, genuinely inhabited.
The difference between suspension of disbelief and secondary belief is the difference between a reader holding their nose and agreeing to go along with something... and a reader genuinely, completely, weeping-over-WALL-E LOST in a story.
One is an act of will. The other is a gift.
Great storytelling earns the gift.
Two Truths Held Simultaneously
Here's the thing that makes this phenomenon so fascinating — and so relevant to what we do:
The suspension of disbelief is the simultaneous belief in two inconsistent things. Anyone who watches The Matrix believes both that we are watching a fight between Neo and Morpheus, but is aware that we're actually watching Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne perform a choreographed sequence of actions being shot on a film set. And it's the filmmaker's job to make it as easy as possible for the audience to suppress that second idea. Blackfoxlitmag
Two inconsistent things. At the same time.
You sit in a Broadway theater. You KNOW those are actors up there on that stage. You can see the stage lights. You know they rehearsed this. You know the set is painted wood. You know they're going to sing their feelings in a moment and that is not how anyone actually communicates.
And yet — if the performance is true — you weep. You gasp. You hold your breath during the climax of a story you may have seen three times before.
Why?
Because one of those two beliefs has completely overwhelmed the other. The emotional truth of the performance has buried the rational knowledge of the artifice so deeply that it simply doesn't matter anymore.
That is your job. As a voice actor. As a puppeteer. As a performer of any kind.
Not to trick the audience. They know. They always know.
To give the emotional truth such complete, specific, genuine weight... that the knowing stops mattering.
The Audience Is Already On Your Side
Here's the thing I really want you to carry out of this post:
The audience is not your adversary. They are your co-conspirators.
They showed up. They pressed play. They sat down in the theater, opened the audiobook, clicked on the VO track, picked up the controller. They arrived at your performance already WANTING to believe.
The suspension of disbelief is a willing act — Coleridge said so himself. They're extending the invitation. Your job is to step through the door.
This is why confidence in performance matters so much — we've talked about this in Confidence Is Silent, Insecurities Are Loud. The audience wants to trust you. They're hoping to trust you before you've said a single word.
Walk into every performance knowing that.
Puppetry: The Ultimate Test of Suspension of Disbelief
Let me tell you something about puppetry — because this is where I come from, and this is where suspension of disbelief becomes the most visible, most undeniable, most extraordinary thing in all of performance.
A puppet is — let's be honest — simply most often, a piece of foam and/or fabric. (Though a puppet can literally be ANY object, but that’s a whole other dive for a whole other blog/class/workshop haha) It has no heartbeat. It has no independent thought. It cannot speak. It cannot move. It cannot feel.
And yet...
Jim Henson could literally be explaining that Kermit is made out of his mom’s coat and ping pong balls and yet Kermit still feels alive the whole time. He didn't even pretend to not be controlling Kermit. He didn't bother with ventriloquism. And yet, Kermit feels truly alive and separate from the person animating him. Directors would sometimes give stage directions directly to the Muppet instead of the human animating it.
Dick Cavett, who interviewed Henson with his Muppets, said: "No matter how much you know about this, it's completely convincing."
No matter how much you know. Completely convincing.
That is suspension of disbelief operating at its absolute apex. The secondary world so thoroughly built, so fully inhabited, so utterly committed to — that even the interviewer who KNOWS he's talking to fabric with ping pong ball eyes finds himself talking to Kermit.
Tom Smith — who wrote a tribute song about Henson after his passing — put it so beautifully it's worth knowing:
"They say, 'Oh that's foam and a wire, attached to a green velvet sleeve. Anyone can do that.' Well, that's true, I suppose, but who else can make them believe?"
Who else can make them believe. 😭
Sesame Street and the Power of 50+ Years of Belief
Sesame Street has been teaching children for over 55 years. In 140 countries. In dozens of languages. And it has done it largely through puppets — foam and fleece characters brought to life by performers who understood something profound:
Children don't need to be told the puppets are real. They already believe.
And here's what makes that extraordinary: they're not being fooled. Children understand, at some level, that Big Bird is a puppet. That Elmo is a puppet. That my man the Count is a puppet.
And they write Big Bird letters anyway. They cry when Elmo is sad. They are genuinely, legitimately, emotionally invested in the wellbeing of characters made of feathers and googly eyes.
Because the performances are TRUE. Because the puppeteers bring genuine emotional specificity, genuine relationship, genuine present-moment connection to every performance. Because the soul underneath the fleece is real.
As Jim Henson said: "As children, we all live in a world of imagination, of fantasy, and for some of us that world of make-believe continues into adulthood." WPPL Blogs
He was one of the ones for whom it continued. And because of that... it continues for the rest of us too.
The Tenuous Part: What Breaks the Spell
Here's where our ally becomes our adversary.
Suspension of disbelief is extraordinarily powerful. It is also extraordinarily fragile.
As cinematographer Greig Fraser put it: "Everyone knows that a movie is false. But if as filmmakers we give the audience too many reasons to lose the suspension of disbelief, I believe we're working our way down a hole." Wikiquote
In animation, suspension of disbelief breaks when a character behaves in a way that contradicts their established personality. When the internal logic of the world is violated. When something happens that couldn't happen, even by the rules of the imaginary world.
In voice acting, it breaks differently.
It breaks when you stop LIVING the performance and start PERFORMING it.
It breaks the moment the read becomes mechanical — when the phrasing is technically correct but emotionally absent. When the character sounds like someone doing a character voice rather than a person with something genuine to say.
It breaks when you're managing the words instead of discovering them. When you're executing a plan instead of having a conversation. When the mic can hear that you're reading copy instead of speaking truth.
We've talked about this throughout this blog — in Behave Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances, in The Words Don't Matter, in Voice Acting Is NOT About Your Voice.
All of it — everything we've built in this blog — is in service of this one principle:
Maintain the suspension. Keep the audience in the secondary world. Give them a reason to keep believing.
Your Responsibility as a Storyteller
The audience walks in willing to believe.
Coleridge called it poetic faith. Tolkien called it secondary belief. Pixar earns it frame by frame. Jim Henson earned it through a piece of felt on his hand that an entire world came to love.
And you earn it — or break it — in the first three seconds of your slate.
In the truth of your first line. In the specificity of your character. In the genuine relationship between you and the imagined listener on the other side of the mic.
The audience is on your side. They came ready to go somewhere with you.
Take them there. Keep them there.
That's the whole gig. That's always been the whole gig.
And WALL-E will make me cry again when I watch it next. And the beginning of UP. And don’t even get me STARTED on how many times I cry in Toy Story 3… 🎙️
Want to Build Performances That Hold the Belief?
Emotional truth, character specificity, phrasing, connection — the tools that maintain suspension of disbelief in every genre, every take, every session — are exactly what we work on together in coaching.
Nate Begle is a voice actor, audio producer, voice director, and coach with 25+ years of industry experience. His credits include national campaigns for Taco Bell, Verizon, Xbox, and Mazda; animation work with Disney, Nickelodeon, Sesame Street, and The Jim Henson Company; 30+ audiobooks; and MST3K Season 13. He coaches voice actors at every level through Begle Booth Studios. and cried at WALL-E more times than he is comfortable admitting.
