Gala night at the Delacorte Theatre, a tiny, open-air auditorium in Central Park. New York's annual alfresco celebration of the Bard, Shakespeare In the Park, is launching its 29th season with a timely production of son-of-his father Henry V's problems with the French. Some of the most pampered posteriors on the East Coast, including Late Night host Conan O'Brien and three of the four* Sex and the City * girls, are trying to get comfortable on the fun-sized wooden seats as King Harry expounds on the importance of a justly fought war ("For when lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner"). But one member of the audience remains properly transfixed. Sunglasses long since forgotten in a forest of dark brown hair, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled tightly over his muscled forearms, Edward Norton's eyes are narrowed to such an intense focus you wonder whether corrective lenses might be in order. At moments of high excitement - and director Mark Wing-Davey's antic staging insists there are many - Norton's mouth falls momentarily agape, recalling some of his less physically intimidating film roles. It takes years off him, frankly. "That play is tremendously resonant right now," marvels GQ's International Man of the Year as he munches a late lunch of fries and soup in a coffee shop near his West Village apartment the next day. "The fact that it's about a man who's going back into battle where his father and grandfather had gone before him...But it's really a play about the responsibility of leadership and the burden that they bear."
As we shall see, the 34-year-old Norton takes his acting and his politics very seriously. But last night had been a chance to kick back. He'd looked in at the after-party, bumping into his friend and two-times co-star Philip Seymour Hoffman, before heading back downtown to finish the evening at lower Manhattan's boite de l'heure, Soho House. It was, by his own reckoning, a perfect New York night: a little theatre, catching up with good friends, generally "rolling the clock a little to the right" as the night owl Norton describes it.
His present hiatus is richly deserved. In seven years and 13 films, Edward Norton's extraordinary facility as an actor has earned him a Golden Globe and two Oscar nominations. The first of the latter was for his debut performance in 1996's Primal Fear, as the young killer who adopts a dual personality disguise to best Richard Gere's vainglorious lawyer. The second came two years later for an even more impressive balancing act involving revolting aggression and redemptive urges as racist skinhead Derek Vinyard in Tony Kaye's American History X. In between, he's shown that he need not merely flip a switch between perfectly delineated alter egos to compel onscreen.
He's played saintly comic figures in Woody Allen's Everybody Says I Love You, Danny De Vito's Death to Smoochy and* Keeping the Faith * (which he also directed), and, with a nod to his upbringing (his father is an attorney) the Hustler publisher's long-suffering lawyer in* The People Vs. Larry Flynt*.
Before last year's Red Dragon, Brett Ratner's 55 million prequel to The Silence of the Lambs, Norton remained best known for his role opposite Brad Pitt as Narrator in David Fincher's 1999 cult classic, Fight Club. But this year he firmly established his leading man credentials as Monty Brogan, the doomed drug dealer in Spike Lee's 25th Hour.
Which makes it all the harder to comprehend Paramount's actions last year, when the studio came to collect on the contract Norton signed after beating 2,000 hopefuls to the part of Aaron Stampler in Primal Fear, obligating the young actor to make two more films with the company. "I'm not actually allowed to talk about the terms of my contract - and they've been eminently clear about that - but I felt it was an obligation that had lapsed," says Norton. Paramount thought otherwise, finally losing patience after reportedly turned down several Paramount roles the better to finesse what was fast becoming one of the most impressive resumes of any young Hollywood actor. Last autumn, Norton was forced to permanently shelve his Signature Theater Company's highly successful off-Broadway run of Lanford Wilson's* Burn This! * or risk a lawsuit from the studio.
Rather than "take it into a profoundly ugly place", Norton obliged his paymasters and reported to work on this month's remake of The Italian Job. A pointless remodelling of the deathless crime caper, TIJ 2003 is further belittled by its own presumption, owing nothing to the original beyond a re-animation (if that's the word) of Michael Caine's character, Charlie Croker, it what must easily be Mark Wahlberg's least engaging performance to date.
Not surprisingly given the circumstances surrounding the shoot, Norton felt it wasn't worth expending any of his considerable creative energies on his part as a Dick Dastardly-style double-crossing gang member. "That's the kind of villain they wanted, so I figured that's what I'd give them. I even gave them the moustache. To be honest, it wasn't something I was particularly engaged with." Not that he didn't bond with the cast, which also includes Jason Statham, Charlize Theron and Dr. Evil's son from Austin Powers, Seth Green. "You, get there and think, 'I'll just float through this.' But people are working hard and it just wouldn't be right to piss on their efforts, or bring a negative or half-assed energy into what they're doing."
Still, Norton absented himself from the film's premiere, citing a prior commitment to the premiere of The Maldonado Miracle, the directorial debut of his girlfriend, Salma Hayek (about whom, amid relentless tabloid rumour of their break-up, Norton remains politely and perfectly silent).
But what chafes Norton even more than what he calls his "unfortunate situation" with Paramount was the failure to secure a credit for the screenplay he wrote for Frida, the 2002 biopic of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo starring Hayek. "It's very Balkan," says Norton of the Screenwriter's Guild's clandestine arbitration process. "It's done by an anonymous panel of three people and there's no appeal." Despite letters of support from the film's director, Julie Taymor, and Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein (according to Norton, Hayek's role as producer meant "there was no way on a formal level she could get involved"), he still lost.
Two good reasons, then, why you might imagine Edward Norton has chosen 2003 to take a sabbatical from Hollywood and base himself in his adoptive New York. Here, between kayaking on the Hudson river and trips out to Jersey to indulge his love of piloting light aircraft, he's working on a script loosely based on Jonathan Lethem's novel, Motherless Brooklyn, which he is producing and in which he will almost certainly star as Lionel, the Tourette's-afflicted lieutenant to a murdered mobster. "I just like to shift gears a lot," he insists. "The things we've talked about don't even move the scale in terms of the good fortune of getting to do the sort of work I enjoy doing. And last year was a very fulfilling year for me as an actor: a big studio film [Red Dragon], I worked with a director I'd dreamed all my life of working with - Spike Lee - and I did a play for six months. I was sort of sated for a while. And I was really looking forward to a break just to recharge my batteries and take care of some stuff in life. And also because I really had an itch to settle down and work on this script."
But could it be there's only so much more of the industry's "rickety rackety" (as his "righteous rhino" Smoochy might have it) before Norton packs it in and does something personally more rewarding? "I think if anything's diminished, it's my patience with the enormous amount of nonsense that surrounds the work. That process that is sort of peripheral to, but inextricably tied to movies and the public going to see movies. That holds less and less interest to me."
Which is why Hollywood should be fearful. After all, history is littered with examples of actors displaying Norton's instinctive skills and intellectual curiosity eventually tiring of Tinseltown's overwhelming obsession with the bottom line.
Marlon Brando, Norton's co-star in the 2000 heist thriller The Score, springs to mind - a renegade-turned-wayward actor which whom Norton clearly empathises: "He was a very modern talent, but it's not as if people were writing a lot for people like Brando."
It's an argument that finds its way into The Score, when Norton's uppity young thief is offered some career guidance by Robert De Niro's ageing safe-cracker. It works just as well as a meditation on the actor's lot: the need to steer a steady course through the creative shallows and occasional aesthetic abyss. It's a great scene, as well it might be. Norton wrote it. "It was inspired by an interview I heard Bob [De Niro] give when I was about 18," explains Norton. "He said that [acting guru] Stella Adler had had a big impact on him when she said an actor's talent lies not just in the way he handles the material, but in the choice of material. Marlon is a great example of a very pure and poetic talent, but I think he would be the first to say that he didn't exercise much discipline across a certain period in what he chose to work on. And I couldn't help wondering if that informed what Stella Adler was saying to the next wave of actors, like De Niro's generation. Because Bob's discipline is legendary. "And that first wave of post-Brando actors, Al Pacino, De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, Meryl Streep - arguably the greatest generation of US film actors - inverted the whole culture's sense of what an actor's value was, or what a lead actor was, and looked at the dysfunctional side of the US character. And I'm the direct beneficiary of that, as are people like Sean Penn and Phil Hoffman, anyone who isn't necessarily anyone's idea of a poster boy. We are able to have careers because of that kind of
'key change' that happened then."
Edward Norton was born in Maryland in 1969 and raised in Columbia, the planned community conceived by his grandfather, the enlightened developer and philanthropist James Rowse. Despite his protestations of normalcy, Norton's upbringing was blessed: his father is a celebrated attorney and campaigning environmentalist, his mother, who died recently, was an educator. Both instilled in Norton concepts of fairness and accountability that have clearly stuck. Acting was an early interest, one he has credited to seeing Sir Ian McKellen in a pre-Gandalf, one-man show. His dedication to his craft would seem to have arrived around the same time: legend has it that the eight-year-old Norton asked his drama teacher, "What's my character's motivation?" for a school production of Annie, Get Your Gun.
After public schooling, Norton majored in History at Yale, where he rowed before he acted, only going up for a part when a back injury forced his retirement from crewing. After spending time in Japan, where he consulted on behalf of his grandfather's Enterprise Foundation and studied aikido, he moved to New York, again working part-time for the Enterprise Foundation while continuing to develop a theatrical career.
Norton's stunning debut in *Primal Fear * may have put him on every casting agent and Hollywood director's speed dial, but it's his time working in downtown Manhattan that seems to have had the greater impact. This becomes clear when we take a late afternoon walk through his old neighborhood. He's more than happy to talk about the mechanics of flying and will wax eloquent on the peculiar joy of flying solo: "For me it's more the meditative component of it. It completely dials the volume down." But what he really wants to do is talk about the lower Manhattan skyline.
Norton, it seems, can name just about every building we can see stood along the banks of the Hudson river.
Partly, you suspect, it's to do with his upbringing, partly his love of his adopted city. Either way, it's steadily seeping into his work. Far from a straightforward adaptation, he's abandoned he contemporary setting of* Motherless Brooklyn* to place his screenplay in Fifties New York, in particular drawing on a real life character from that era, an unelected city planner called Robert Moses. "What he did in terms of the physical infrastructure of the city," explains Norton, "like ramming the highways through the old neighbourhoods, was kind of a watershed in the history of New York. If you look at a map of the city in 1870, all the activity was on the periphery. And Moses played a singular role in sealing the city off from its waterfront. Only now, especially on the West Side, is it beginning to reclaim that connection with the waterfront, with the Hudson River Park and hopefully the High Line."
A 20-block stretch of elevated railroad track built in the Twenties to serve the industrial Lower West Side, the High Line fell into disuse in 1980. Since when, according to Norton, it's grown into "a two-and-a-half mile study in what would occur if people were absent from the urban landscape. It's nature pointing the way to what an incredible elevated park it could be."
To this end Norton is supporting a campaign to re-purpose the mouldering railroad as aerial parkland for the neighbourhoods of lower Manhattan. He's been joined by celebrities and dignitaries, but it's the two businessmen who first fought to save the rotting structure who inspire him. "They single-handedly changed the momentum from one where it was almost certainly going to be torn down to one where I'm almost certain it will be redeveloped into some form of incredible public space. How can you not pick up the phone and say,
'What can I do to get involved?'"
For a man who has clearly become highly skilled at assuaging his loss of anonymity with a variety of street-smart behavioural tricks ("I should teach a CIA course"), Norton is unrepentant about using his celebrity in this way. "When you're getting paid too much money and you have people paying attention, you have to be a little bit heedless not to use that to try and engage in meaningful ways with people. I don't have a lot of material needs in my life. So I try and support the things that I'm interested in."
Right now, that includes a deal Norton has struck with BP Solar, whereby the world's largest solar energy company has agreed to donate 25 solar energy systems a year to low-income LA households in return for Norton selling solar panels to famous friends. Pierce Brosnan, he says, has already placed an order. "I'm not a big fan of dilettantism. I mean, it's better than doing nothing at all, but you've got to be willing to follow through on some level. And part of the fun of the solar thing is actually working the problem and coming up with a way to solve it creatively. And we've crunched the numbers out to show that for anyone with money, it's a no-brainer."
Another initiative the actor has personally underwritten to the tune of over 60,000 encourages Yale students to visit the Middle East, the better to foster understanding in the region. Not surprisingly, the man who has President Kennedy's inauguration speech ripped to his iPod doesn't discount the possibility that he might one day run for political office. "Without having lost any interest in my work as an actor or someone who makes films, I do feel a shifting balance. I have started to feel almost an equal degree of personal drive to engage in things outside work. And without over-inflating any one person's ability to have an impact, you can't just sit around and do nothing." "We have some of the most regressive leadership that this country has had since the Depression, and in the last year or two I've had an increasing sense that we've reached a moment when people in the United States are either going to step up and get a little more proactive and loud about defining in which direction the conversation is going to go in this country, or we're going to have shut up and stop complaining."
So is there a time when he can see himself stopping acting altogether? "There are a couple of things underway that I'd like to see through, but I can definitely see myself stopping for a year or two. I don't really want to get the end of my life and acting to have been the only thing that I did. And it won't be. Even if you examine it purely in the continuum of acting, that ability to really transport people can really fade if you're out there every month. Look at Daniel Day-Lewis. Who knows what he was doing with his time? But he comes back and he's as great as ever. Maybe even more so, because we're not all so fucking burned out on him!
Really, there's something in that."
Originally published in the October 2003 issue of British GQ.
