Narcissists are not good actors. They are the best actors.
And the reason is they don't know that they are acting. They believe their own confabulations.
And apropos acting, my name is Sam Vaknin. I am the author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited, the first book ever on narcissistic abuse. And I'm a professor of clinical psychology.
At the core of the narcissist, there is an absence, a black hole, an emptiness. And it is into this emptiness that they can introduce anyone.
They can assume anyone's identity with ease, into perfection, because there's nobody there to start with. It's a room waiting to be filled.
Once they have assumed the character of another person, real or imagined, they then become possessed by the character. They become the character. They morph, they shape-shift, they switch into the character.
They do not feel or know that they're acting, as I said. They believe their own confabulated narratives and fiction.
And so that makes them supreme and superb actors.
An actor is an emptiness, a void waiting to be filled, filled by the brainchild of a scriptwriter, by a character, by another human being.
And so the actor is a receptacle, a container. And this is exactly the definition of a narcissist.
It raises the question of course whether good actors are narcissists to start with.
And there's no rigorous research about this, but the indications are strong that they are.
Narcissists feel more comfortable in fantasy than in reality. This means that they feel more comfortable when they act rather than when they behave, when they are someone else and not themselves.
They feel more comfortable in introducing themselves into a story.
They're storytellers, and they use themselves as the raw material of their stories.
Reality is repugnant and abhorrent to them. They substitute for reality with daydreams, with narratives, with stories, and then they proceed to become an element, an ingredient, a component, and a character in the stories and narratives that they have concocted, all intended to avoid harsh and potentially challenging and undermining reality.
The narcissist has this inflated, fantastic, grandiose self-perception, which is very brittle and fragile and vulnerable.
Reality, on the other hand, is harsh, unforgiving, uncompromising. Reality can puncture the narcissist bubble.
And the narcissist is terrified of reality because only reality has this power. Reality can deflate the narcissist, drag him or her away from the fantasy, force the narcissists to confront veracities and facts that the narcissists would rather ignore or pretend they don't exist or reframe somehow.
And it is in acting that the narcissist feels most egosyntonic. It is in acting that the narcissist can pretend that he is not or she is not. It is in acting that the narcissist can conjure up a paracosm, an alternative reality, and then inhabit this new ecosystem, this new habitat.
So acting is the natural state of the narcissist.
When acting fails with a regular actor, a mentally healthy actor, if there is such a thing, not an oxymoron, but when actors fail, they learn to pick up the pieces. They pick themselves up, they learn the lessons, and they somehow recover.
The narcissist cannot afford such failure, such narcissistic mortification. It is life-threatening. It introduces the narcissist, puts him in touch with the deep-seated reservoir of shame that he has been harboring since early childhood.
So the narcissist must avoid failure at all cost.
When the narcissist acts, he simultaneously caters to the predilections and needs and wishes and expectations of an external audience, but he is also engaging in something that I call internal audiencing, an imaginary audience within the narcissist, perhaps the field of all internal objects.
And the narcissist serves as his or herbest, most adulating, least critical audience.
This leads, of course, to self-supply. The personal fable.
These are adolescent elements. The personal fable and the imaginary audience are typically in adolescence and so the self-supply allows the narcissist, should the need arise, to ignore naysayers and haters and critics outside, people who see through him realize that he or she is acting and then expose the whole thing.
The narcissist is an imposter and suffers from the famous imposter syndrome. He's always on the alert. He's always terrified of being exposed for who he is or she is.
And so withdrawing inwards, catering to his own needs as his or her own audience, self-supplying, this is the solution, but it doesn't disrupt the narcissists acting even when the narcissist is alone even when the narcissist is his or her own audience even when the narcissist self-supplies he is still acting to an audience of one, himself or herself.
Narcissists have been rehearsing all their lives, essentially the same lines. The other characters change, circumstances, predicaments, environments, challenges, exigencies, they all change.
And of course, the narrative or the script is then customized to fit the new requirements and the new expectations, the new demands.
But the story remains the same. And narcissist has been rehearsing this story his or her entire life.
The narcissist therefore is well versed in acting the shared fantasy the narrative that underlies it, the storyline, the script, the schema, if you wish.
The narcissist is an actor who is intimately and exceedingly well acquainted with his role and his only, and his head only, a single role all his life.
Narcissists are charismatic. They're energetic. They're driven because they're addicted to narcissistic supply. And they're confident. This allows them to convince people that they're not acting that it is true to pull the wool over people's eyes to deceive them to calm them.
And in many ways the narcissists acting is a form of con artistry but it's not deliberate. It's not intentional. It's not cunning or skimming or even manipulative.
The narcissist is not a psychopath. The psychopath is goal-oriented. The psychopath acts because that's the best way to accomplish the aims and the purposes that the psychopath set himself out to achieve.
The narcissist is different. The narcissist acts because he cannot find himself in reality, because he needs to embed himself in an environment that would somehow buttress and uphold his grandiose, inflated, fantastic self-perception.
Narcissists have no choice but to act. The psychopath acting is a choice.
Narcissus, exactly like psychopaths, are endowed with cold empathy. Cold empathy is a combination of cognitive and reflexive empathy. And cold empathy allows the narcissist to scan his audience, to push the audience's buttons, to obtain reactions from the audience, to interact with the audience in a way that would mimic affect and emotions and empathy.
The narcissists cold empathy allows the narcissists to somehow seamlessly merge with his audience and resonate with them to perfection.
And yet it has its limitations because it does not contain an effective emotional component.
The performance of the narcissist, however accomplished technically, is tone deaf, cold and dry. Something is off, and people feel it. This is the uncanny valley reaction.
And finally, the entire edifice crumbles and unravels because the narcissist cannot cathect for long, cannot remain emotionally invested in anything for long, and because the narcissist has no access to positive emotions and empathy, and therefore the narcissistic rendition of another human being would be superficial and artificial, not deep, not profound, and would look much more like an imitation or a simulation, a simulacrum, an act of mimicry.
And this wears off and wears thin the longer people are exposed to the narcissists act and acting and theater play and self-directed movie.