The Norton Anthology
Calling from the L.A. set of director David Fincher's Fight Club, Edward Norton wonders how I'll treat our 20-year friendship in this story. I tell him that no matter how much I like seeing him on-screen, part of me is always thinking, I can't possibly enjoying this as much as the person next to me: I know this guy.
He mulls this over and then agrees. "Acting is frustrating in one sense," he says, "because whatever you do, the people closest to you will be able to enjoy it the least."
"So," I say, "I guess this is the right time to tell you I think you suck."
"Exactly!" he yells, laughing. "This is where you write, 'As a reporter, I must in good faith observe that, though many people consider him a stunning, award-winning actor, I myself have never seen it. I don't know what all the hoopla's about. I've known him since he was eight, and he's not doing anything he hasn't been doing for years!'"
That much, at least, isn't true. It's an oddly dissonant experience when the kid with whom you hoarded Star Wars action figures gets nominated for an Oscar - and it's stranger still when the kid with whom you memorized Woody Allen's comedy routines turns up as Drew Barrymore's fiance in Everyone Says I Love You. (Edward, for his part, cheerfully says of the latter, "It's both wonderful and strange.") How can anyone explain the leap someone takes from a childhood watching movies on TV in Columbia, Maryland, to kicking Richard Gere's ass in Primal Fear
For me, seeing Edward on a movie screen makes Hollywood seem more real than it probably should. This month's Rounders, for instance stars Edward and Matt Damon as gamblers who fall into trouble in New York's high-stakes underground poker world. Damon is the star, but Edward's role is flashier - the Ratso Rizzo part, if you will - and he tears it up. But instead of completely enjoying it, I find myself compulsively counting the number of times the camera cuts from Edward to Damon. And when I watch Edward's more controversial fall release, American History X, a stylized story of a young neo-Nazi's attempted redemption, it's jarring to see the intellectual guy I know embody America's worst nightmare: a muscle-bound, hyper-intelligent skinhead with a swastika on his chest and an automatic in his hand.
With every role, Edward sets himself apart from his generation of young actors - including his friend Damon, who has said he models himself after Tom Hanks. Unlike the others, Edward is not the boy next door, or even the boy you necessarily wish lived next door - he's the boy you never imagined existed. To me, of course, he was the boy down the road: Part ordinary guy and part overachiever, he was both the childhood best friend I rode bikes with and the child actor who had a lock on little-boy stage roles in every dinner theater in the Baltimore-Washington corridor. Edward says that high-school self-consciousness caused him to drift away from acting during his teens, but when he went on to act in productions at Yale. When he relocated to New York, where I had been at Columbia University, we became friends again: He was the guy whose plays I attended - until he snagged himself an audition for Primal Fear
In New York, Edward was simultaneously ambitious and relaxed, wearing his aspirations shockingly well. If there's a key to his approach to acting, it's his unwillingness to put anything before the job itself: Since his big break, Edward has been determined to dodge the usual celebrity gauntlet, turning down profiles in nearly every national magazine. "He's ducked the press more than I have," observes Matt Damon. "But then again, this is his first experience with Miramax, so we'll see how he does."
The fact that Edward's work comes first means that some of those who know him don't necessarily know him well. "You get the feeling that there's a lot to know, and you've only gotten a small portion of it," says Rounders director John Dahl. "And I think, in a way, that's part of what makes him intriquing as an actor. Well, you know him, Bob - what do you think?"
As someone who's watched someone he knows make it big, I've noticed that, instead of cultivating an image, Edward is doing his best to have no image t all. But any star's public and private spheres inevitably clash: Reports of Edward's alleged romantic involvements have turned up in the media with absolutely no response from him - until this past July, when he wrote a letter to The New Yorker defending Courtney Love, his The People vs. Larry Flynt costar, from attacks in a story about Nick Broomfield's documentary, Kurt and Courtney. How can Edward shy away from the media, I wondered, then lash out it when his voice isn't heard? Edward, of course, doesn't see it that way. "[Broomfield] never even asked [what we thought]," he says. "He had no interest in the opinions of what many people actually think of the person."
When a friend makes it big, you don't have to all the answers, but you do a lot of wondering about how naything you shared in boyhood could have possibly shaped his future. "I have a huge early movie memory with you," Edward tells me on the phone. "Remember all those Abbott and Costello movies we used to watch?" For a moment, we're second-graders again, climbing up my orange-carpeted stairs to the TV room. "My mother wouldn't let me watch movies all day on Sunday," he continues. "I would say, 'I'm going to play with Bobby,' and I would go down to your house. I remember you always had boxes of Nilla Wafers, which we never had." He laughs. "I was totally into Nilla Wafers and Abbott and Costello."
It's a fun, silly memory, but Edward feels a definite connection between his childhood studying films and his adulthood acting in them. "I think our generation has learned to act by watching movies," he says. "But there's some kind of a dilution of the real understanding that I think great actors have - the theatricality of acting even when it's on film. And I think we suffer from that a little bit. We produce more movie stars, but we produce fewer real actors."
There's never been a question about which of these Edward would rather be. The Edward I saw saw on location for Rounders last spring in the West Village had no backstage psychodramas to speak of - a perspective Damon shares. "There was no kind of shocking story of showing up and Edward's in his underwear doing a handstand saying, 'I'm getting there! I'm getting there!'" Damon says. "He likes to talk about what the scene is and what he wants to do - and he's really involved with the writers and really starts picking his battles there."
Given that kind of commitment, Edward's never been coy about his desire to direct. He is slated to helm and star in Keeping the Faith, a romantic comedy by Stuart Blumberg, a friend from Yale. And he had what he called a "dramaturgical" role in developing American History X: Working with first-time screenwriter David McKenna, Edward helped reshape the screenplay months before shooting began.
His involvement didn't stop there. When post-production on American History X hit a standstill last year, New Line brought in several people - including Edward and Oscar-winning editor Jerry Greenberg (The French Connection) - to help director Tony Kaye complete the picture. Kaye is now placing full-page ads in Variety to make his case against the currrent cut. Edward is mystified by Kaye's behavior. "I think it's going to be the best movie a director ever took his name off of," he says. "For a first-time director to get a year and a half of postproduction time from a studio to edit a film is literally unheard of, and after that, they ultimately moved forward with the best cut they had."
The cut happens to showcase some of Edward's best work - his character's transformation eclipses that of the bipolar misfit he played in Primal Fear. I, for one, see a link between Edward's effectiveness in these roles and the fact that he keeps a low profile: He does his best work when he disappears. "What interests me about this process is getting as far away from myself as possible," he says. "Not that I don't like myself."
Still, he maintains that fame isn't an inconvenience. "Seriously," he says to me, "we've done lots of stuff together, out and around on the streets of New York since all this went on, and there's nothing about it that diminishes the experience of my life, right?"
Edward laughs again, "I suppose all this could change," he says. "I was talking with a friend about how Leonardo DiCaprio and even Matt have had to deal with this insane boytoy, teen-idol kind of thing, and I was going, 'Thank God that's not a part of my experience, and I don't think it ever will be.' And my friend said, 'Wait till they see the swastika and the pecs. You're going to be in trouble.'"
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