WHAT lies behind the facade of a man who earns his livelihood pretending to be someone else?

Not much, if you believe Las Vegas’ premier Michael Jackson impersonator, Kenny Wizz, who’s coming to Canberra soon.

“I don’t think there’s much to me,” he tells “CityNews”, “I don’t think I’m that interesting, I grew up like any normal person and did normal things.” Wizz says he shies away from thinking about himself, but he does concede that what he does for a living is “interesting.”

You can say that again. The self-effacing artist is known for slipping completely behind the persona of the “King of Pop”, with his extraordinary resemblance to the late Jackson matched by uncannily familiar hand gestures and hip movements.

“The type of job I do is not a normal job,” Wizz concedes. “You have to have a certain thought process to take someone like Michael Jackson on, I suppose that’s the interesting side, but there’s not much I can say that would be interesting to a lot of people… it’s something I’m not used to.”

So unused is he to talking about himself that he doesn’t even celebrate his own birthday, preferring to send his mother a bunch of roses each year on that occasion. “It’s her day, really,” as he says.

He admits to being in his 50th year and that figures, since he was around 20 at the time Michael Jackson released his sixth studio album, “Thriller”, in late 1982, thus changing the whole music video scene.

Wizz says he grew up in Los Angeles and was involved with music from a very early age. “At the time I was a teenager,” he says, “music was in transition from disco to the more danceable music of the ‘80s.”

What was more, the MTV phenomenon had begun in 1981. “Breakdancing was hot and that was our focus… To be part of the dance team was the thing for us.”

That’s why Jackson was so wonderful to the young Wizz.

“Any time you saw him dancing, you could look at that guy and not think he was a singer at all… he could have made it as a dancer, he was that captivating,” he says.

“Everybody was crazy about ‘Thriller’, even if they weren’t Michael Jackson fans, it was something that was so different… the music and video were incorporated with costumes, a story and a lot of dance.”

To Wizz it’s the sheer theatre of Michael Jackson’s art that he most admires.

“He was great at turning music videos into an event, everybody was sitting in front of the TV set to say they wanted to be part of that,” Wizz says.

In his own stage show of at least 20 of Jackson’s greatest hits, Wizz firmly rejects a tedious chronological approach, telling “CityNews”: “We wanted to break it up so that people don’t know what’s coming along next, that’s important in the theatre.”

He admits that Michael Jackson was a tragic character, and indeed, Wizz was so affected by Jackson’s death in June 2009 that he shut down his act for a time.

“But we don’t go into that in the show, though we want to touch base with Michael Jackson in celebration,” he says.

“We say to the audiences ‘you may have gotten a bit down, so we’re going to bring you back up’.”

“Michael Jackson HIStory II”, at The Playhouse, Tuesday, April 1, bookings to 6275 2700 or canberratheatrecentre.com.au