The Minnesota creative behind @StPaulPrince talks Morph, Prince, mentorship, The Uncanny Experience and why imagination means more when it gives something back.
My introduction to Adrian Perryman did not begin with a résumé, a press release or somebody explaining why I needed to know his name. It began with Bugs Bunny.
A very fly “Thugs” Bunny, to be exact.
The styling was right. The attitude was there. The execution was sharp enough to stop the scroll. And once I did what any responsible journalist with an unhealthy relationship to curiosity would do and started digging, the character on the screen quickly became the least interesting thing about the man wearing the costume.
Perryman is a cosplayer. He is also an educator, DJ, community organizer, former collegiate athlete, mentor and lifelong St. Paul resident whose creative life has become inseparable from the responsibility he feels toward the people around him.
We got to the person underneath it.
It Started With Prince
There is an appropriately Minnesota origin story behind Perryman’s entrance into cosplay.
After Prince died in 2016, a concert celebrating his life was held in Minnesota. Perryman had been DJing a wedding shortly before the event when an idea occurred to him. What if he ordered a Purple Rain costume and actually wore it to the concert?
He did.
The response, as he remembers it, was strange and fun at the same time. More importantly, it pushed him into something he had rarely done outside of Halloween: dressing as a character in public and allowing himself to be seen doing it.
That may sound like a small act until you understand what cosplay requires.
There is fabrication and styling, certainly. There is research. There is photography. There can be makeup, performance, engineering, design and a surprising amount of money hidden underneath something that looks effortless on Instagram.
But there is also vulnerability.
At some point the costume has to leave the bedroom.
Perryman told me that cosplay has made him more confident, introduced him to people he would not otherwise have met, taken him places he might never have visited and made him considerably more comfortable being uncomfortable.
His reasoning was wonderfully practical. Once strangers have already seen you walking around in a full body spandex suit on a Saturday afternoon, a lot of ordinary risks become considerably less terrifying.
That sense of play is visible throughout his work. Perryman is not interested in producing the safest possible interpretation of a character. He likes finding the version that feels like his.
That is exactly what happened with Morph.
Mutant and Proud
Perryman’s relationship with X Men began, like it did for an entire generation, with the animated series on Fox.
Morph initially became something of an inside joke. If Perryman attended a cosplay event without wearing a costume, he would tell people he was Morph and had simply transformed into himself. (Pretty clever if you ask me!)
Eventually, the joke became a challenge.
While preparing for an X Men related gathering in Minneapolis, Perryman wondered whether he could assemble his own Morph cosplay in roughly a week. He began finding pieces, building on the idea and trying to solve a problem that sounds very specific until you see the result: how do you make Morph look cool without making the character look unintentionally terrifying?
The answer was to approach Morph the way Perryman approaches much of his creative work. He wanted to do something he had not already seen everybody else doing.
But our conversation about X Men quickly stopped being about costumes.
For generations of fans, mutants have provided a language for otherness before many viewers were old enough to have language for their own differences.
Perryman remembers watching these characters as a child and absorbing questions that were much larger than superheroes. Why was one group treated differently? Why could somebody who looked different still be extraordinary? Why could one character pass unnoticed while another could not? He specifically remembered storylines and character details that introduced ideas around race, adoption, appearance and belonging long before he completely understood the social realities underneath them.
Then he said the sentence that really stapled the conversation between him and I.
“If you can have love for X Men, you shouldn’t have any hate for anyone else.”
There it is.
The cape, the claws, the telepathy, the blue skin and the impossible powers have always been the invitation.
The question underneath them is what you do when somebody standing beside you is different.
For Perryman, fandom does not stop when the costume comes off. It’s just the affirmation of being a good hero.
The Hero Work Happens on Monday Morning
I asked Adrian who he was on a Monday morning, when there was no character to inhabit.
His answer made the rest of the conversation make more sense.
He described himself as somebody who loves humor and having fun, but also somebody who believes he has dedicated much of his life to giving back.
That value began at home. His family worked in the nonprofit world, and service became something ordinary rather than ceremonial. Today he works in education, including with a scholarship program supporting business students. His responsibilities include recruitment, programming and helping develop students through their university years and into their lives as alumni.
His philosophy of mentorship is refreshingly free of hero worship.
Young people, he said, often benefit from seeing that accomplished adults are still human.
Executives arrive late. Powerful people occasionally stumble over their words. (I’m still working on that part myself). People with impressive titles have scheduling conflicts. They make mistakes.
And the world keeps turning.
For a student trying to imagine themselves as a future leader, that can be freeing. Perfection stops being the entry requirement.
Perryman believes showing up honestly, including the parts that are imperfect, gives young people permission to imagine leadership without first having to imagine themselves becoming flawless.
That belief in service became even more personal in 2016.
It was the same year Prince died. Perryman also lost his father.
And in the Twin Cities, Philando Castile was killed by a police officer.
Perryman had attended the same high school as Castile, who was a few years ahead of him. In the aftermath of Castile’s death, Perryman and several former classmates found themselves sitting with anger, grief and disgust.
They decided to turn some of that emotion into action.
The group organized a community event that also helped raise money for a scholarship created in Castile’s name.
For Perryman, it became another lesson in what community involvement could actually mean. Pain did not disappear because somebody organized something. But energy could be redirected toward creating something useful.
That distinction matters.
There is a version of being a creator that is primarily concerned with being observed.
Perryman seems much more interested in participating.
More Than the Feed
Social media has a way of reducing people into categories because categories are easier to process, market, and remember. One person becomes the cosplay account, another becomes the fitness account, someone else becomes the educator, the activist, the musician, the comic relief, or the person whose entire digital identity seems to revolve around whatever happened to perform best on the feed that week. The platforms reward that kind of clarity, but real people are rarely that tidy.
Perryman is a useful reminder of what gets lost when we confuse a profile with a person.
During our conversation, I learned that before cosplay became one of the most visible parts of his creative identity, athletics had already shaped a very different chapter of his life. He played football, competed as a collegiate sprinter, earned multiple conference championships and national qualifying times, and was eventually inducted into his university’s athletic Hall of Fame. That is not the kind of accomplishment most people casually forget to mention, but Perryman does not seem especially interested in treating every former achievement like a permanent headline. (I love how he was so chill about his accomplishments, too chill)
He talks about that era with humor, describing himself as someone who used to “run fast and turn left,” and there is something revealing in the way he frames it. The success is real, but he does not need it to dominate the version of himself he is presenting now. Athletics belongs to his history without becoming the only lens through which he understands himself.
That perspective also explains why you are unlikely to find his cosplay page constantly reminding people that there is a Hall of Fame athlete underneath the costume. Perryman has separate spaces for different parts of his life, and some chapters simply do not need to be performed repeatedly for an audience in order to remain meaningful. He is also understandably reluctant to advertise himself into an impromptu race at a convention while dressed as Morph.
Still, the athletic background matters because it reveals something about the architecture underneath the creativity. Years of training, repetition, preparation, competition and discipline do not simply disappear because the uniform changes. They become part of how a person approaches new challenges. In Perryman’s case, the same willingness to practice, experiment, commit to a process and tolerate discomfort shows up in the creative work, the community work and the way he talks about mentorship.
What makes him interesting is not that he contains a surprising number of accomplishments. Plenty of people do. It is that none of those accomplishments seem to require him to become overly precious about himself.
He can take the work seriously without treating himself as sacred. He can be disciplined without becoming rigid. He can care deeply about execution and still leave room for humor, curiosity and play.
That balance is harder to find than social media would have us believe, because the internet often rewards people for becoming more exaggerated versions of whatever first made us stop scrolling. Perryman appears to be doing something more difficult and, ultimately, more sustainable.
He is allowing himself to remain a whole person.
The Uncanny Experience Is Coming
The Uncanny Experience returns to Minneapolis on September 12 and 13, 2026 at the Minneapolis Club.
The fan produced event describes itself as an immersive celebration built around the experience of entering Xavier Institute rather than simply walking through another convention hall. Its programming includes panels, a Mutant Market, cosplay, themed environments, interactive assignments and an after party. This year’s listed guests include Lenore Zann, Fabian Nicieza, Adrian Hough, Stephanie Williams, Matthew Waterson, Eric and Julia Lewald, Rachel Kimsey and Don Aguillo.
General admission weekend passes are currently listed at $100 before service fees, while additional VIP, Omega and after party options are available. The event runs from 10 AM to 5 PM Saturday and Sunday, with earlier entry for qualifying ticket holders.
Perryman makes an important distinction about what attendees should expect.
“The Uncanny Experience has that name because it is much more than just a con.”
He describes it as an immersive weekend whose details are designed around giving attendees an experience rather than simply assembling vendors and guests inside the same building. He even recommends that visitors coming from outside Minnesota give themselves extra time before or after the event to experience the Twin Cities.
It feels appropriate that Perryman would be drawn to that particular kind of fandom.
The best conventions are not really about purchasing proximity to something you already love.
They are about finding the other people who love it too.
Creative Work That Leaves Something Behind
When I asked what he hoped somebody discovering him for the first time understood, whether through cosplay, education, music, community work or a particularly accurate algorithm, he did not talk about followers.
He talked about creativity and responsibility.
“I like to be seen as a creative individual that tries to bring something fun and new to all that I do.”
Then he added something more important.
“I think that everyone should give back to their community in some shape or form.”
That may be why Adrian Perryman matters to the creative world.
Not because he has figured out how to turn himself into somebody else.
He has figured out how to use creativity to become more completely himself.
There is room in that life for Morph and Prince. For music and athletics. For jokes and scholarship programs. For fandom and grief. For complicated conversations about prejudice. For oversized 3D printed objects he has not finished building yet.
He has new cosplay work developing, plans to bring new creations to BlerdCon and WonderCon next year, and is digging further into 3D printing, art and large format fabrication.
He has not mastered the algorithm.
Thankfully, he does not seem particularly interested in trying.
Find Adrian Perryman at @StPaulPrince.
And if the algorithm happens to introduce you through Thugs Bunny, Sunspot or Morph first, keep scrolling.
There is much more underneath the mask.
Experience The Uncanny Experience
September 12 and 13, 2026
Minneapolis Club
729 2nd Ave S
Minneapolis, Minnesota
The immersive X Men fan gathering features themed Xavier Institute experiences, panels, creators, performers, cosplay, a Mutant Market and more. The organizers state that the event is independently produced by Giant Size Productions and is not affiliated with Marvel Entertainment, Marvel Studios or Disney.
