Actor Edward Norton's Great Leap of Faith
BALTIMORE- So, Edward Norton, do you still have your cat?
"My cat?" The serious young actor, clad in the serious young actor's requisite garb--black T-shirt, jeans and a cloak of mystery--feigns outrage.
You had a cat at one point.
"I have a cat?" He's getting more agitated by the millisecond.
Yeah, we read that a stray cat walked into your house. You gave it a hot dog and took it to the vet, and it never left.
He sits quietly for a moment.
Finally: "Well, umm, that umm, that is true. But I can't remember how I would have shared that story. Wow," says Norton, who can't imagine ever being so forthcoming.
That Norton likes to keep his private life private is an understatement. Clearly, if he's going Garbo about Maggie, a tabby named for the female lead in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," there's little point in broaching such hotter-still topics as his bygone Courtney Love-life or rumors that he's presented a rock to sex kitten Salma Hayek. It's not, he insists, that he has anything to hide. It's just that he doesn't want his celebrity to contaminate "the work."
But for the new millennium, he says, he has opened up--a good thing, too, since he's got a new film, Keeping the Faith, to promote.
Here, um, are his, like, er, thoughts about opening up:
"I think that, it's not that I'm, it's not that I consider it, my feelings about it haven't changed, I think I've gone down the road with it far enough now that I don't feel, I'm not hesitant, nervous. I feel like I've been able to strike a balance, you know, with it that I'm comfortable with, that I'm at ease with. That doesn't compromise, where I don't feel like it's compromising me on any level either creatively or personally at all."
Then you won't mind our asking whether Maggie's upstairs in your bedroom right now.
"I'm afraid I can't answer that," says the 30-year-old Norton, who actually smiles for the first time. And that's no small feat for a fellow who seems to bear the weight of planet Hollywood on his thin, sloping shoulders.
But then he has chosen a heavy load. A two-time Oscar nominee for his eerily authentic work in Primal Fear and American History X, the prodigiously talented actor specializes in troubled souls--a ranting skinhead in "X," a card cheat in Rounders and a psychotic insomniac in last year's controversial Fight Club.
Now all of a sudden, the Maryland-bred actor has got religion. He's gone from a priest-killing altar boy in Primal Fear, his 1996 film debut, to an adorably dedicated young priest in Keeping the Faith. The frothy romance, thin as a communion wafer, is the reason he's agreed to this little get-together in the Pier 5 Hotel's otherwise empty restaurant.
The film, written by Norton and Stuart Blumberg, who just happens to have been his best friend at Yale, follows the exploits of the priest and a rollicking rabbi (Ben Stiller), who both fall in love with a childhood playmate (Jenna Elfman). A vow of celibacy, religious intolerance and Elfman's workaholism seemingly stand in the way of a happy ending.
Norton, who also directed the picture, finds depth where others go wading. "The thing I first responded to was that Stu's story was a classic screwball comedy in the sense that the obstacle to love was not existential. I think that in post-Annie Hall romantic comedy, and certainly my generation's comedy, from Reality Bites on, the obstacles have been angst, male neurosis and personal existential neurosis."
And personal existential neurosis really bites.
Love and laughter in an Edward Norton film: Can we expect more of the same in the future?
"I'll never really lighten up," he says. "But I don't know if I ever wanted the Prince of Darkness mantle. I mean, you kind of end up getting [typecast], and I hope this movie helps just kind of shuck that perception." He adds that he has played comic roles onstage and that he sang, danced and yukked it up in Woody Allen's 1996 musical, Everybody Says I Love You.
"Nobody saw it, though," he adds regretfully.
Actually, the slender celebrity looks more like a song-and-dance man than a dangerous lunatic as he stares out at the Inner Harbor with his earnest blue eyes. It's a vista with a lot of resonance for him. His grandfather, developer-architect James Rouse, transformed the harbor in the early '80s from urban eyesore to inner-city theme park.
He would be sorry to see it now, says his grandson. "My brother and I were driving some friends past here last night, and we were telling them the history of the harbor. I remember when there was a dump on the harbor's edge. And our friends were sort of marveling at it. And I caught my brother looking at the same thing I was looking at: a huge Barnes Noble sign on the tower of the Power Plant. It just flattened me. I was really devastated because when the pavilions opened, there were idiosyncratic, shops with funky jewelry, wonderful kites and homemade ice cream."
Rouse's legacy has since mutated into a chain-store-dominated example of boomer decadence of the sort that inspired last year's anti-consumerist blood fest Fight Club. That film holds a particular significance for Norton.
"To me, Fight Club was really like the needle in the eye of the 20th century. It was the perfect film for the end of 1999 to sort of say, 'This is a critique of everything we have botched up in this century.' What it has wrought is people going crazy to try to discover themselves," he postulates.
"It was very much about my generation's Zeitgeist. There was a unified sense that we wanted to portray the resentment our generation feels toward the baby boomers. They've always expected us to live up to the monumental legacy of the '60s. A lot of them sold out in the extreme and went on to create an environment that's more corporate, more franchised than ever."
Right on, dude. Now where did we put that Ikea catalogue?
When the chance to make Keeping the Faith came up, he followed his muse.
"This film is a very nice way to kick off another century." The least he can do after summing up the last one.
"It just felt like a nice change of gears," he says, adding, "It didn't feel at odds with any of those other statements" his other movies have made. "It just felt like a celebration of a confusing but positive component of the diverse world we live in now."
The movie rabbi's congregation doesn't want him to marry a shiksa. And the subject is now ecumenical bliss.
"Certainly where I live in New York, everybody's becoming a mutt. The lines and definitions and boundaries are blurring at such a rapid rate that people are sort of casting about for a sense of self. I think this was Stu's feeling while writing the script. As a young Jewish man, he is a progressive, urban humanist who dates girls from different backgrounds. But he's Jewish and he cares about those traditions. The movie was embracing the idea that we're all going to have to deal with that together and that maybe the best thing to do is kind of take a deep breath and relax about it."
When it comes to the rest of America, the actor figures it would be an enormous benefit if we shared a common mythology. "It's how we feel connected to other people. It's how you feel not alone, and it's what, it's one of our, one of our most basic forms of self-analysis and looking for meaning and lessons and things like that," maintains Norton, who can't resist going into a spiel on myth maven Joseph Campbell. "With multiculturalism you have a fragmentation of myth and, therefore, you don't have everybody sharing the same theological myth, so where are your common stories?"
For a free translation, call 1-800-ED NORTON.
Norton premiered Keeping the Faith in Manhattan. "It was a dream come true: a New York audience at the Ziegfeld," he says enthusiastically. "Stuart and I were, we've seen countless films there and we were looking at each other and just going, 'We're at the Ziegfeld with our own movie and it's really funny,' and it was a film people were clearly enjoying. I mean, it's a thrill to hear people laughing."
In a recent conversation with Steven Soderbergh, the director of Erin Brockovich, Norton remembers saying, " 'I've done this film and it's very square. It's very straightforward for me.' And he said, 'You know what?'--and I hadn't seen Erin Brockovich--and he went, 'I did, too. And I feel so good about it, I never want to make another art movie.' "
Norton, on the other hand, isn't ready to jump into the mainstream quite yet. "I love disturbing films like American History X and Fight Club, and I will always try to make them if I feel connected to them," he says. "But I've realized that laughter is just as important."
He ought to try it a little more often.
The information about EN's cat Maggie came from an October 1998 cover article on EN published in George magazine (Edward Norton's Primal Fear). Originally intended to be an article on extreme politics to coincide with the release of American History X, the final result included info on his cat, his books, and his Persian rugs. As you might be able to guess from his reaction to the questions on his cat in this interview, EN was not too happy with the George magazine article. This is not an unusual reaction from EN, he prefers to keep the focus on work and away from anything personal.
What was surprising was to actually find a picture of Edward Norton and his cat Maggie. The German magazine Cinema featured a pictoral of EN behind the scenes on Keeping the Faith along with handwritten comments by EN about the action in each picture. In a picture of EN working with Stuart Blumberg (EN's good friend and KTF's screenwriter), there is a cat relaxing on the couch a few feet from EN. EN makes no mention of the cat in his comments. I imagine that the white pawed cat of the picture is EN's white pawed cat Maggie, but I can't state it for a certainty. Click here for the Cinema photos.
Another surprising tale comes not from EN but from the interview itself. There is talk in the article about EN's Manhattan premiere of Keeping the Faith, but not the Baltimore premiere, which was held two days later. While the article includes EN's thoughts on how Baltimore's Inner Harbor has changed since he grew up in nearby Columbia, there is no mention of the premiere at all. EN dedicated Keeping the Faith to his mother, who passed away a few years earlier, and the proceeds of the Baltimore premiere went to The Living Classrooms Foundation and the Robin Norton Scholarship Fund of St. Frances Academy. For more details on the Baltimore premiere, click here
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