Edward Norton is impenetrable. We know this because we’ve seen him playing a series of conmen, tricksters, schizoids and award-winning shysters who keep the rest of the world at a firm and fixed distance.

We know this too because he has said so. Not literally, of course. That would be too, like, penetrable. But just listen to the 37-year-old Boston native and twice Oscar-nominated actor explaining the allure of his latest character creation, Eisenheim the magician, from The Illusionist. “As a person he is highly impenetrable,” Norton says. “But onstage he comes to life, and has this amazing presence.”

He is describing himself. Only he doesn’t know it. For, offstage, here in a quiet London hotel room, Norton is an elusive, unfathomable creature, a whipsmart Yale graduate and polymath who speaks fluent Japanese, is conversant in Chinese history and social anthropology, flies planes, directs charities, writes music, plays guitar and dates power babes such as Courtney Love and Salma Hayek.

In this role, as a nonactor, he presents a defiantly reluctant front. He is the essence of quiet civility, speaking in precisely meditated sentences about his craft with focused eyes and a furrowed brow. Most other topics, though, are off-limits — he is even hesitant to discuss his work for the charitable housing organisation the Enterprise Foundation (he doesn’t want to turn it into a “star” thing).

Background

• The Illusionist

• The Illusionist - Sunday Times review

• Jessica Biel: playing hard and fast

• Tricky business

The real international man of mystery

Kevin Maher speaks to Edward Norton, star of The Illusionist and an enigma in his spare time, about the art of impenetrability

Related Internet Links

• 2007 London Film Festival coverage

• Times Online Film Trailers

Onscreen, however, Norton is a phosphorescent presence. In The Illusionist his hooded eyes burn with a melodramatic intensity entirely appropriate to the role of a mysterious 19th-century magician. “Edward onscreen always looks like he’s holding something back,” says Brian Koppelman, the producer of The Illusionist . “It’s like he knows something special.”

This sense of öber-intelligent inscrutability is not exclusive to The Illusionist either. It’s there in all of Norton’s best roles: in the ersatz Kentucky hick who turns out to be a psycho-killer in Primal Fear (1996); in the double-crossing safe-cracker of The Score (2001), and in the phoney cowboy protagonist of Down in the Valley (2005).

What these characters have in common is their penchant for performing. What they reveal in Norton is a virtuoso actor who explores the mechanics of his craft from within his own performance. In short, he plays brilliant actors brilliantly. “I see the thread you’re pulling through,” he says, smiling wryly. “And yes, I think that notion of a façade, or of people who are hiding some aspect of who they are, is interesting to me. And it may seem obvious and simplistic, but characters like that are just rich to play.” There is, of course, nothing obvious or simplistic about Norton. The son of a teacher mother and a federal prosecutor father, he had the sort of patrician background that might have indicated a future champion of industry, or a Democratic senator. His grandfather, for instance, was the civic activist and real estate developer James Rouse, who invented the shopping mall and popularised the concept of urban renewal.

After his stint at Yale, Norton worked in Osaka, Japan, for the Enterprise Foundation. However, always an acting fan, he decided to return to the US and become one of the best performers of his generation. And in some ways it was that simple. He didn’t do the traditional bit-part graft of most Hollywood stars. Instead, the very first audition tape he made, for Gregory Hoblit’s thriller Primal Fear , got him right to the top. That tape, he admits, has already become part of Hollywood lore. “Someone told me that my audition tape was like the Nirvana demos when they went through the music industry,” he says.

“We were making Primal Fear and I kept getting all these calls to go and meet Milos Forman, Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola. And I remember turning to the casting director and saying: ‘What is this based on?’ And she said: ‘Everyone has seen the tape.’ And I was like: ‘What tape?’

“And she said that my audition tape had been copied and sent round the industry. And that was the first time I had this dim sense of something going on that was getting, well, strange.”

It got stranger still with an Oscar nomination for Primal Fear and a string of intense roles that established Norton’s reputation as a Method perfectionist, putting on 30lb of muscular bulk for American History X (1998) and losing it all for Fight Club (1999). Along the way his perfectionism bled into all aspects of production. He admits to rewriting the entire screen-play of Frida (2002) for his then girlfriend Salma Hayek, even though he had only a tiny role in the movie.

His love of the Method led him inevitably to Marlon Brando, and the two became friends and then co-stars in The Score . The lesson he learnt from Brando, he says, is to insulate yourself from hype. “Otherwise you’ll be polluted by the nonsense that people say about you.” In Norton’s case the nonsense people say about him has veered deep into his private life. His two-year relationship with Courtney Love after they worked together on The People vs Larry Flynt (1996) was much publicised, not least by Love herself, who told Vanity Fair in 2003 that she was still madly in love with Norton and had left everything to him in her will.

His subsequent relationship with Hayek also became leading tabloid fodder, especially when the Daily Mirror allegedly overheard Norton wooing an LA lap-dancer with the immortal line: “I want you to come for a ride in my new electric car!”

Norton himself says that our contemporary celebrity culture is toxic. He won’t engage with it because it destroys the mystique around his work and muddies the effect of his performances.

And yet, is this not the complicated crux of being Edward Norton? That the urge to remain an enigma, to be insulated from the public, is a risky strategy? How long can you remain an enigma when you continue to star in high-profile Hollywood movies? And what do you do when the enigma is fully exposed and understood?

“I am very interested by that question,” Norton says, with typical sincerity. “Because I can see that moment creeping round.”

He says that he has a lot of interests outside movies, including flying aircraft and the creation of a programme to provide free solar heating for low-income Californian households. But he wants, he says, to answer the question properly. “Let’s say this,” he announces, after an epic 13-second silence. “Some of the novelty of doing the work may not be as fresh as it was for me. So yes, I fully expect at some point that I’ll stop wholesale doing this.”

So you’re announcing your retirement, then? “Well,” he says with emblematic impenetrability. “It would be fun to go away from it totally. But then to come back again too, at some point. I think I would enjoy that.”

Master of the Method: Edward Norton’s finest hours

American History X (directed by Tony Kaye, 1998) Norton snagged his second Best Actor Oscar nomination (the first was for Primal Fear) as the beefed-up and heavily tattooed neo-Nazi Derek Vinyard in this potent exploration of American racism.

Fight Club (David Fincher, 2000) The press at the time was all about Brad, and his abs, and his uncapped teeth. But Fight Club would be nothing without Norton’s cleverly grounded deadpan narration and sympathetic physical turn as an Everyman on the brink of 21st-century insanity.

25th Hour ( pictured above) (Spike Lee, 2002) Lee’s impassioned love letter to an embattled post9/11 New York is buttressed by Norton’s performance as the convicted drug dealer Monty Brogan. His raging and expletive-filled five-minute monologue at the centre of the movie is astounding.

Down in the Valley (David Jacobson, 2005) The movie was 20 minutes too long, but Norton’s performance as a Californian sociopath who pretends to be a Mid-western ranch hand is one of contemporary American film’s finest turns. Worth it for his Taxi Driver riff alone.

The Painted Veil (John Curran, 2007) Possibly his most punishingly restrained performance yet, as an uptight English bacteriologist fighting cholera in rural 1920s China. This forthcoming adaptation of the Somerset Maugham novel co-stars Naomi Watts as his long-suffering wife.

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