The past decade has seen a proliferation of work on populism, a field generally dominated by the ideational approach of Cas Mudde, offering a conceptualization of populism as a substantive position, worldview, or set of ideas underpinning public policies. In contrast, this paper proposes an alternative framewrok and draws on performative theories to shed new light on understanding populist leadership. The performative school transcends the boundaries of political discourse to place its focus on the sociocultural and stylistic-aesthetic aspects of populism. Within this conceptual framework, the paper analyses the performances of Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, respectively. Suited to empirically informed theorizing, the cases offer avenues to further develop the performative approach and to expose the limited explanatory power of the ideational paradigm. The paper’s contribution to the literature is twofold. It offers an explanation of the co-exsistence and hybridization of elitist and populist elements in the case of Boris Johnson, and highlights the need for distinguishing between populist and popular forms of representation in the case of Jeremy Corbyn, thus promoting conceptual refinement.