Profiles: Edward Norton
It has taken Edward Norton just over a year to establish himself as the finest young character actor in America. The 27-year-old Yale graduate was almost completely unknown until his stunning turn as a teenager accused of the murder of a bishop in Primal Fear, in which he dominated a cast led by the likes of Richard Gere. He has since become the most sought after twentysomething in Hollywood and it's not hard to see why; Norton's performance exhibited a control and subtlety that belied his lack of experience, and he saved the movie from becoming the overwrought shocker it threatened to turn into.
Since then Norton's been working nonstop. He gets to show off his singing talents in Woody Allen's tongue-in-cheek musical Everyone Says I Love You but first up is The People Vs. Larry Flynt, Milos Forman's controversial take on Hustler magazine founder Flynt's battle to defend his right to publish porn. An unlikely champion of civil liberties, Flynt was prosecuted for publishing a crude cartoon suggesting a well-known U.S. TV evangelist lost his virginity to his mother. Flynt subsequently took his case to the Supreme Court and in 1988 won a landmark decision that established the freedom of the American press to print whatever they like, no matter how salacious or unpleasant it may be, so long as they make it clear that it is intended to be satirical.
The chance to work with Forman was behind Norton's decision to take the role of Flynt's lawyer, even though the movie has been attackedfor making a hero out of a man who built a multi-million dollar business out of depicting women as sex objects.
"At first I wasn't quite sure what the point was in looking at this guy," explains the articulate Norton. "Then they told me that Milos was going to do it and that radically changed my interest in it because he's in my top five filmmakers of all time. I've seen every ine of his films numerous times, even his old Czech ones."
With his short hair and boyish face, Norton hardly looks old enough to shave, but plays Flynt's long-suffering legal advisor with style and some humour. His character is one of the few in the film who can't be accused of being an unprincipled scumbag. Norton, though, is quick to defend the notorious Flynt.
"It's just uninformed to write him off as a sleaze merchant. I'm not saying that he's not a sleaze merchant - he is what he is - but it's too easy to write him off as that He's a very intelligent man and he has an articulate awareness of his role as a defender of the common man's right to the same constitutional privileges that The New York Times has."
This is frankly bullshit. The only write Flynt is interested in is his right to make as much money as possible from his porn empire. Norton himself claims to have little experience of Flynt's stock in trade.
"It doesn't interest me that much. I kind of subscribe to what the guy I play in the film said one time. He said, 'After the second one, it's really just a medical journal.' And that's kind of how I feel," he says straight.
So he never had a stash of mucky mags when he was a teenager growing up in suburban Maryland?
"Yeah, there was stuff in the back garden, I recollect. I certainly didn't care who was publishing it at the time."
The People Vs. Larry Flynt also features Courtney Love in her first starring role. And according to the U.S. tabloids, she and Norton soon became more than friends during the four-month shoot in Memphis. He sighs and shakes his head when this is mentioned to him.
"That's exactly the kind of stuff that I don't have a lot of patience for. It's like we're friends and we had a really great time working on the film. She was completely professional on every level. I mean, the camera waited on me and Woody fa more than it waited on Courtney."
Norton is wary of the media, mainly because he thinks exposure in the press will reduce the impact of his acting.
"You serve the roles you're playing more if you can keep all kinds of personal baggage out of it," he claims. "When I saw Schindler's List, Ralph Fiennes realy knocked me out. A big part of the potency of that performance was the fact that I had no perception of him other than as Amon Goeth. If Anthony Hopkins had done that role, i'm sure he would have been magnificent, but it would have been a different experience. I think you can preserve a fair amount of anonymity and it's a pretty strategic thing to do in terms of playing different roles."
It's doubtful that Norton ever envisaged himself crooning on screen but that's what he was required to do in Everyone Says I Love You, and he did it so successfully that Woody Allen had to tell him to be less smooth.
"He wanted it to be as if the characters themselves were just tempted to sing. I did one take and he went, 'You sound too much like Perry Como', so we pulled it back a little."
Norton's next project is the independent American History X, in which he plays neo-Nazi skinhead. It's another character role, which is exactly what he wants.
"I'm just not going to function as a performer in the way a Brad Pitt functions - I don't have that to offer. But that's fine because my interest in the whole thing is pretty much in exploring a diversity of experience. That's the fun of it for me..."
David Eimer
The People Vs. Larry Flynt is released on April 11 (1997, U.K. release date) and is reviewed on page 45.
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