The New Edwardianism
At the end of last year's Primal Fear, lawyer Richard Gere turns to leave the young hick he's successfully defended in a murder trial. But then he does a double take and turns back. Why? The kid has made a verbal slip, revealing that he is not a terrified runt at all, but a callous killer. The look on Gere's face says everything that the audience feels: How could I be taken in by this... this nobody? Precisely because the somebody who played this nobody was Edward Norton, acting in his first feature.
Since Primal Fear, Norton has played Larry Flynt's put-upon lawyer, Alan Isaacman, in Milos Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt and Drew Barrymore's singing, dancing lawyer fiance in Woody Allen's Everyone Says I Love You, both in theaters this month. These films aren't vehicles for Norton's coiled rage, but they show how he can slip seamlessly into straight-man roles. It's clear that, at twenty-seven, he is an actor capable of being as electrifyingly intense as the young De Niro--or as urbane as a young Ray Milland.
The De Niro comparison is one I feel confident about, having seen Norton's screen test for Tony Kaye's film American History X, which goes into production this month. Norton riffed during the test as a neo-Nazi hate monger. He neither lapsed into Travis Bickle shtick nor proclaimed, "I'm the only one here"--but there's no new actor in American movies who's more "here" than Edward Norton.
GRAHAM FULLER: In American History X, your character will start out as a tattooed, pumped-up neo-Nazi skinhead spewing out racist harangues. I've seen your screen test and it's ugly stuff. I wasn't prepared for it, even though I'd seen you manifesting hatred in Primal Fear. Why do you want to play this role right now?
EDWARD NORTON: I've been looking for a part like this for a long time.
Needless to say, it was an extraordinary set of circumstances that gave me
the opportunity to do Primal Fear, but it also felt appropriate
because the character I played was bread and butter for me. During the
process of my trying out for it, the big question for the director (Gregory
Hoblit) was whether or not I'd be credible showing the character's sweeter
side. That was a stretch for me, whereas the angry side of him was of a
piece with what I'd been doing on the stage here in New York--so is the
character I'm going to play in American History X.
I'm very excited about doing this film. I certainly don't have any
empathy with what my character espouses, but there's something about that
level of intensity that I find very stimulating. It's anger coupled with
brilliance, and that's always a fascinating place to muck around in as an
actor. The guy is not monolithically evil. He's got very specific,
well-thought-out reasons and experiences behind his extremely hateful
politics. I don't have any built-in need to express this ugly racial
stuff, and I don't claim any dark past or horrible experiences that make
me need to do that, but it feels good to me psychologically and emotionally
to let that kind of anger flow out of me. I don't know why I feel I have
the capacity to do it well, but I feel that I do.
GF: How important to you is the final result of a performance?
EN: It would be the height of arrogance, or incredibly dishonest, for any actor to say that they don't care how people respond to their work. When you hear people coming out of the screenings of Larry Flynt and they're talking about First Amendment issues, it's a fantastic feeling. So I care about the result very much. That said, it's good to have some perspective on the overall cosmic importance of the whole thing. You have to broad-minded enough to understand that it's all part of a general attempt to entertain and move people, but if something falls short, it's not the end of the world. I'd love to think there'd be a time when I could look at a script and say, "I know for sure this is going to be a great film," but that will never happen. More and more, when I start a film, it's a process of hoping. You do it because to work with Milos Forman or Woody Allen, or to play a role like this skinhead, whether or not the film ends up flawed, will be a worthwhile experience.
GF: In the American History X screen test, you reminded me of Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. It's the kind of rabid intensity that isn't sought after much in Hollywood today. Right now there's more of a pull toward cute, blithely cocky, and entirely palatable young actors.
EN: The next Tab Hunter, as a friend of mine said recently.
GF: And let's not delude ourselves, you're not the next Tab Hunter.
EN: I hope not. [laughs]
GF: Is there a standard of looks for leading men in Hollywood--as there certainly is for women--that might be restricting you?
EN: I haven't yet gone up for something and not gotten it for the kinds of reasons you're talking about, so I can't really complain. There may be all kinds of things I'm not getting offered that I just don't know about. And that may be because they don't think I'm good-looking enough . My instinct is that it's much less limiting for men than it is for women. I can't see myself, frankly, being a fifteen-million-dollar-a-picture actor who, through his charisma or whatever, puts asses in seats. And I don't think my face is ever going to open a movie. I'm glad about that, though, because if I was basically playing the same role over and over again, I'd go crazy. Making films is a grind, and what makes it worthwhile for me to go through that grind is if the work is a complex challenge to me each time. It gives me much more of an adrenaline rush to hear someone say, "I didn't recognize him in that role," than, "He's so cute."
GF: Over the course of the last nine months, by virtue of your acting, you've become a subject for magazines, newspapers, for public attention, for potential celebrity, but you've been very cautious about doing press. You've divulged nothing about your upbringing, or, indeed, about your reported involvement with Courtney Love, someone who's had to deal with a lot of attention herself--not always the most flattering. Why are you so scrupulously private?
EN: On the whole, it's my instinct and my
taste not to share my personal life in a public way through this process.
It makes me uncomfortable for a number of reasons. One, I have clearly
observed--prior to experiencing a little bit of it myself and while
working with other people who have experienced it a lot--the degree to
which fame can be an enormously destructive force. There is no overstating
the extent to which it can be corrosive to the thing I value most, which,
much more than my work, is leading a good and happy life.
Two, I feel that the value of things in your personal life gets somehow
diminished by the sharing of them randomly, arbitrarily, with everybody.
It's like having your own emotional private experiences become anecdotal,
which is an awful feeling to me. It cheapens things. When your own
complicated, nuanced experience is communicated in the media, its
complexity is inevitably reduced to a very convenient, oversimplified,
usually hyperbolized positive or negative version. I doubt there's anybody
who's ever experienced this who wouldn't say that it gave them a
gut-wrenching feeling. It's just... it's maddening. Maddening. And I see
no upside to it, so it's something that I will continue to guard against
as much as I possibly can. Beyond that, on a purely professional level, I
really don't feel there is any unwritten obligation you have as a
performer to share your personal life with people.
As an actor, you have so little autonomy anyway. Musicians and painters
and writers can go off and play and paint and write; in acting, you can
know, with every bone in your body, that you could eat a role alive, but
you have to wait for somebody else to say you can. And when people finally
do say yes, the experience can be so heady, such a relief, that you let an
enormous number of things happen before you even know that they're
happening. A lot of people accept that it's automatically part of the
package to let themselves become fodder for the media grist mill. I reject
that notion, and I think that more people ought to, politely, just say,
"It's really none of your business."
I also think that for me--and this is not true for everybody--it could
corrode what I think I have to offer as an actor who can do different
parts that are as unrecognizable from one another as possible and that
really bring characters to life in a rich or complicated way. Every little
thing that people know about you as a person impedes your ability to
achieve that kind of terrific suspension of disbelief that happens when an
audience goes with an actor and character that they're playing. I did
almost no publicity for Primal Fear and that was a calculated
strategy. No one was going to go see that movie because of me, and the
most I had to offer was anonymity. The potency of the revelation about who
my character really was in that film was in part reliant on the fact that
people absolutely no prior knowledge of me. They had no reason to expect a
different voice or anything different from what they were initially
presented with. Obviously, I'll never be able to achieve that kind of
surprise again. But, nonetheless, when I think about actors who are
wonderfully chameleonlike, I also think about how little I know about them
and how much that enhances my ability to believe them. I remember going to
A Room With a View. I was late and I missed the opening credits,
and at the end somebody said, "Wasn't Daniel Day-Lewis amazing?" And I
said, "What do you mean?" And my jaw dropped when I realized he'd played
[Cecil Vyse] in that film. I knew nothing about Daniel Day-Lewis; I still
don't. And as an audience member, I value much more highly the experience
of what he can do for me as an actor than I do the particulars of his
personal life, about which, frankly, I don't give a shit.
GF: Isn't there any danger that your very guardedness could fuel speculation about you and therefore increase media attention?
EN: Maybe. It's already happened on one level--
and I don't really have any interest in talking about this broadly--in
regard to something you mentioned, which is Courtney. Who is a friend of
mine. Who I am not going out with. Who I'm not romantically involved with
but worked with on a film. Due to the high level of public interest in her
and the tendency to slap her into a romance with anybody whom she's
working with, I entered that sphere of conversation. A story that ran in a
tabloid magazine percolated up into a widespread news item. I think it's a
study in the degree to which the tabloid press is becoming the nexus for
legitimate news in America. It's kind of laughable, and when I saw
Courtney at the press junket for Larry Flynt, we did laugh about
it. But you can let other people boil your blood for you if you're not
careful. I'm not maniacal about this, and I'm not deluding myself that a
person should be able to pursue their craft in public and not be subjected
to this kind of stuff. If you think you're above everything that comes
with being an actor, you're fooling yourself in a very unsophisticated way.
So I understand it and expect it, but it doesn't mean that I'm going to
participate in it. I don't have any desire to be some clam--or Greta Garbo.
There are plenty of people willing to help you play into a dark-prince
mentality, which I find almost equally unappealing. But that would take
more energy than I want to expend on this whole side of things.
A friend recently asked me how it's all going. As we were talking, I
agreed with her that it would be highly ironic if--having just played a
lawyer who asserts people's rights to express themselves and ask the
questions they want to ask--I turned to someone and said, "You don't have
the right to ask me." Anybody can ask anything, but I firmly believe that
I have the right to answer or not, especially if I can explain why. It's
when there's an aggressive agenda that it tends to produce in me a desire
to say, "Buzz off."
GF: Have you changed in the nine months or so that you've been exposed to the public gaze?
EN: There's an inherent gamble in pursuing a
creative life. There's a more dangerous gamble of course, in knowing that
you want to do something and never doing it, because then you're denying
your own fulfillment. But when you do go after it, there is--with every
passing month and every passing year--this growing knot of tension and
fear that builds in your stomach. You feel you are never going to get that
chance and that you're going to have sacrificed all your other
opportunities to that one grail or that happy fantasy. In my case, there
was a sudden zero-to-a-hundred thing that happened when I got the role in
Primal Fear. I've been acting most of my life and professionally in
New York theater for a number of years, but that one role changed the
landscape of my opportunities radically, overnight, as much as anything
ever can in this business. And, with that, the knot in my stomach suddenly
started to unwind. At first that brought relief, then a growing sense of
excitement and contentment and gratitude. It's made me much more relaxed
as a person. I'm still intense, still a zealous control freak. I fight very
hard to get things to be the way I think they ought to be. But right now
life doesn't feel so fraught with potentially deep unhappiness and
frustration.
So I feel there's a horizon of possibility. It's a nice position to be
in; I'm lucky. At the same time, all the excitement of that has been put
into stark perspective by things that have happened of a personal, family
nature. In some ways, the highs of it have been blunted, which in a way,
is a gift. All the things I've talked about have had almost zero potential
to make me feel stressed or negative because there's been illness in my
family. It's nothing I care to talk about. People come up to me and say,
"You must be flying!" But my experience of the last year and a half has
not simply been about working on Primal Fear, The People vs.
Larry Flynt, and Everyone Says I Love You. It's been a period
of all kinds of downtime, personal unhappiness, and traumas that distract
you from your work and the good things that are happening, as they would
anybody. I mention it because life isn't just about the peaks. It's much
more complex than the events that celebrity communicates to people.
GF: By its very nature, celebrity detaches the subject from his or her humanness. It's kind of set up that way.
EN: Yeah, and you know what? It's easy to say, "Oh, you know, grim things still happen." Even without that darker end of the spectrum that I've experienced in my private life--even if things are cruising along quite nicely--life remains a minute-to-minute experience. I can't think of a better way to put it.
Back issues of Interview magazine can be ordered by calling Brant Publications (212)941-2900. Check the availablity of the issue before sending money (to save yourself the time and aggrevation).
If you have new information on Edward Norton (and you can provide a verifiable and reputable source), please email me- Susan
Note: Articles and images have been posted without permission for noncommercial and nonprofit use
with no intention of copyright infringement. The purpose of this reprinting is to disseminate correct information about the
actors, films, and studios. I have included author names and links to sources whenever possible.
