After graduating from Yale—where he majored in history, but discovered a passion for theater—and laboring in New York's Off-Broadway scene, Edward Norton nabbed a plum role in the thriller Primal Fear, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. Immediately dubbed one of the most exciting actors of his generation, Norton wound up on a career fast track, and his combination of all-American charm and wiry intensity was put to good use in The People Vs. Larry Flynt and the Woody Allen musical Everyone Says I Love You. From there, Norton started adding darker shades to his persona with roles as a two-bit card hustler in Rounders, a neo-Nazi in American History X, a yuppie gone anarchic in Fight Club, and a regretful drug-slinger in 25th Hour. His attempts to work behind the camera have met with middling success, from his directorial debut Keeping The Faith to his partially credited (or wholly uncredited) work on films like Frida and the underrated Down In The Valley. After a brief absence from screens, Norton appeared in three films released in 2006: Down In The Valley, the surprise hit The Illusionist, and his new W. Somerset Maugham adaptation The Painted Veil, in which he stars alongside Naomi Watts as a British scientist who journeys to inland China to fight the cholera epidemic of the 1920s. Norton recently spoke to the A.V. Club about reserved characters, his films' place in history, and the struggles to get credit for his work.
The A.V. Club: You've starred in three movies this year, and in all of them, you've played characters who keep their emotions or motivations close to the vest. Is it harder for you as an actor to suggest emotion than to express it?
Edward Norton: They might be the same thing. Or the suggestion of emotion, I think, is sometimes a truer depiction of the way people express themselves than big, demonstrative emotion. I'm fascinated by the ways in which people express themselves, because their responses are often counter to what they're actually feeling. Like when they're frightened, they tend to freeze. When they're angry, it doesn't always come out as volume. There are wonderful contradictions in the way that people express their emotions. And I think sometimes their oppression of emotion and the weird way it comes out is more interesting than painting it in bold primary colors. These three films this year, they are all people who on one level or another are keeping things tucked in. But you know, another way of looking at that is just that whenever you tell a story, you're choosing to tell a certain piece of that story. You're always choosing the start point and the end point. And almost by definition, the most interesting period is where something happens, as a result of which something is different at the end. And so to me, the idea that you know everything about a character at the beginning is sort of ridiculous. Something has to be revealed. I like it when the deeper you go with the character, the more you see the layers start to peel away. It's more challenging to me, but it's also just interesting. Those are the things I like to watch. I like to watch the evolutions of something.
AVC: But if you give a reserved performance, how can you be confident that what you want to express will carry over?
EN: That's certainly the challenge. You take a movie like The Painted Veil. There are no magic tricks in it. There's no big stage. There's nothing in the nature of the story that's going to be demonstrative. So in a way, you're committing to the notion that the slow changes in the relationship between these two people is compelling. You're saying, "Yeah, we can make something of this that's worth watching." And that is challenging. It begs the question you just asked: Is that enough? Is that something that's interesting? And I think that it can be. I don't know if you ever saw the Coen brothers movie The Man Who Wasn't There…
AVC: That's as minimalist as it gets.
EN: That is a masterpiece of minimalism. Forget the film, even. It took such balls for Billy Bob Thornton to give a performance like that. Do you have any idea, as an actor, how courageous you have to be to give that performance? You have to so trust the people that you're working with, which clearly he did and should. But to do that little, and realize how horrifying that can be… As an actor, if you step to the side and you look at [Thornton's performance] technically, and you try to imagine doing what he was doing, most people would panic. Most people would be on the set, and they would be panicking, going, "I'm not doing anything!" All the ham instincts in you would be screaming, "You've got to indicate something here." And it's beautiful, in a way. And so I appreciate, even as an audience member, the courage that it takes to be… frankly, to be subtle.
AVC: When you sign on to a project these days, do you expect a certain level of creative input? What is the ideal working situation for you?
EN: There isn't a single one. Every movie is different. On Down In The Valley, I got involved in the very early stages, when [writer-director] David Jacobson had literally just disgorged this strange idea of a guy wandering in the modern-day West. He'd written something that was very different in all its narrative points from what the film became, but he was hitting at something I related to deeply. We spent eight months writing together. Then we raised the money together. I produced and he directed, and we cut the film together on our Macs. And it was one of the best collaborations I've ever had. But I don't expect—nor do I necessarily want—to do that every time. I don't expect to have the kind of partnership I had with David, like a feeling of synergy. Other times, I really like to read something and go, "This is beautifully executed, I really like this director's work, tell me where to show up, and let me service this as an actor." And working to service somebody else's vision, with no involvement whatsoever in either the production or the development of the material, is still something that I love to do. And then there's the flip, which is just doing one yourself, like me and one of my partners writing something, producing, and directing it. Each is different, and when people are communicating and the boundaries of the collaboration are well-established in the beginning, any working situation can be very happy.