In ‘A Complete Unknown,’ Edward Norton Enters His Gandalf Era

Edward Norton has made an impressive career out of playing angsty, self-absorbed, sneaky-smart hotshots. You can draw that line all the way from his breakout in 1996’s Primal Fear to his most recent Oscar-nominated turn in 2014’s Birdman . That’s precisely why the gentle, warm power of his work in A Complete Unknown , out Christmas Day, feels revelatory. The Boston native has played a wide range of roles over his career—but as the soft-spoken, banjo-stringing, quietly revered folk icon Pete Seeger, he pulls off as cozy a performance as anything in his filmography.

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That said, his work in the film—which has already earned Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award nominations—also has a bit of bite. James Mangold ’s docudrama, largely told through live musical performances, captures a particular moment in American music that starts in 1961, when a young Bob Dylan ( Timothée Chalamet ) lands in New York City with a handful of dollars and no notoriety whatsoever. Over the next four years, under the steady guidance of Norton’s Seeger, he becomes an icon, resisting his growing celebrity and the confines of folk music as rigidly defined by Seeger and his peers. This culminates in Dylan’s decision to go electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, against the wishes of Seeger’s crew.

In the film’s immersive climactic setpiece, Seeger reveals a new, darker side that deepens Norton’s take on the character. It’s a reminder of the actor’s longstanding gifts, and what can happen when they get put to fresh, surprising use. In Norton’s own words, it’s just the kind of work he’s looking for these days.

Vanity Fair: You signed onto this film later than the rest of the cast, and I believe it’s the only movie you made this year. Are you more selective these days? What are you saying yes to?

Edward Norton: The inspiration does ebb and flow with me. Sometimes my mind is on other stuff, and maybe the bar goes higher in terms of taking something. Something has to really get under my skin to make me put down other things I’m doing and make room for it. I do get invested. My kids are young, I like to be with them. You’re making a choice.

If I get to a place where I’ve got a clear mind, I tend to want to start writing my own stuff again or contemplating what I might do. I’m a little bit picky—not in a way like I take it for granted. I agree with Judi Dench : When you have the privilege of having someone ask you to do something good like this, I don’t take it for granted at all. It’s special. I’ll put it this way. There’s a point where someone might say, “Read this,” and you read it and it’s a heist movie, and you go, “It’s not that this is an important piece of work, but I’ve never done a heist movie. That sounds fun.” There might just be novelty to a genre. I might be getting to the point where I’m not going to do something just because it’s a genre that I’ve never done before. It’s a thing I need to feel some sort of a connection to, or an investment, or that it’s got something to say. Have you watched No Direction Home , Scorsese’s [Dylan] documentary?

I have.

There’s that great bit where Bobby Neuwirth goes, “Back then people didn’t say how many records you sold if you’ve got something to say.” And I love that. It’s something I feel is authentically different about that time. A lot of people that this movie depicts were trying to effect things. They had a feeling of purpose. In a weird way, they were a little bit skeptical about money, and man, I do not feel that’s the ethos of the era that we’re in now. Maximization of box office, of record sales, of streams—that’s the collateral of the land. It’s a bit depressing, because there’s a lot going on in the world, and American culture is guilty of putting the highest value on maximization in its various forms. I’ll be honest: I sometimes am amazed at the degree to which I see it. You said frequency of work; I’m like, “I did not become an actor to turn into a 9:00 to 5:00 salary slave.” I don’t know when acting became a volume game. I really, really don’t relate to that. I didn’t do it to never have time to do anything else. I am amazed at what almost seems to be the anxiety people get into about not working.

I’ve spoken with a lot of actors lately who’ve said it’s a weird time right now. There’s the combination of industry contraction, and the aversion to making movies like this—the kind of stuff I gather you’re interested in.

Does this movie get made without Timothée being unusually right to play [Dylan]? Let’s forget whether Timothée has had some hit movies lately that helped them rationalize in making this movie, which is great. I think it’s so beautiful that he said, “This is what I want to do.” But when I look across the landscape of not only good actors, but just human beings, there’s not a lot of people I would look at and say, “Yeah, I could see them playing Bob Dylan.” I always say, “All actors are more or less plastic.” Right? It’s not about whether they’re good. I think Harrison Ford is a really good actor, but he’s maybe not the most plastic actor. Daniel Day-Lewis is a really great actor, and he’s a super plastic actor.

Roles are more or less plastic too. There are a lot of versions of the part I played in American History X . You could interpret that in a lot of ways; that role has a lot of plasticity. There’s a lot of people who could do a version of that. But Bob Dylan has not got any plasticity. Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan. There are very, very, very few people that I’m almost willing to suspend disbelief and go there, and he pulled that off.

Pete Seeger is not Bob Dylan, but you were also tasked with giving live musical performances and playing a well-known figure—and again, you signed on closer to filming. How did you prepare?

To me, the time function doesn’t change the nature of it. If it’s a real person, you’ve just got to spend the time on them. Inevitably that’s an analytical process; you’ve got to immerse yourself in as much as you can about them. If we’d done this film 20 years ago, it would have been a deeper challenge, I think—to go back and find, in the Museum of Film and Television, the New Jersey Public Television folk show that Pete did. But right now, all 37 episodes of Rainbow Quest are on YouTube. You know what I mean? It’s unbelievable. I don’t think there’s a recorded concert of Pete Seeger’s that you can’t find on YouTube. I’m talking Berlin Television Studios in 1963, where I found my favorite performance of “We Shall Overcome.” You can do it sitting in your kitchen. So in that sense, I was lucky we did this in the era we did it in. All of us were able to get to know a lot about these people pretty quickly.

You mentioned the timeline, though, and probably on a timeline basis the music is the thing you could always use more time on.

Did you feel comfortable with the music going into it?

If I hadn’t played guitar for a long time, I would have felt really uncomfortable about it. But I felt the right blend of nervousness and excitement. I thought, “Can I get there? Can I learn banjo stuff enough?” It was right on the edge, but I felt like I could do it.

Did you train with someone?

Oh yeah, you’re not just winging it—you’re working into a very specific portfolio of songs and there’s a whole music production team around. You’re going for very targeted stuff, and some of it’s going to be done live in the movie. You’re coordinating.

What did you know about Pete going in, and how did working on the movie complicate or deepen that perception?

He’s a fascinating person. He lived into his mid 90s, and the breadth of his life and what he was engaged in is just staggering. The decade that precedes this film, when he was blacklisted in the Communist witchhunt period, was very interesting to me and very illuminating. I had not known that someone of his stature had suffered such a suppression of his career, and it informs the emotion of this new generation of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary. The people that he inspired specifically who picked up the torch that he’d kept alive—if you don’t understand the ’50s and what he went through, the emotion of Dylan’s rise for him is cut back down enormously. So that was big. There was a lot of potency in the 10 years before this film’s story, in terms of the way he’s behaving and what the stakes are for him within this one.

He acts in some ways as the heart of this movie, yet he’s holding onto a version and an era of this music that, in a lot of ways, Bob is pushing back against.

What really impressed me about the way Jim [Mangold] was approaching it was he wasn’t creating protagonist and antagonist. He was very interested in letting you see each character’s worldview—that for a period they’re in the same lane, and then they end up in different lanes. Pete Seeger has a certain type of integrity, and Bob Dylan has a certain type of integrity; the film doesn’t even really choose a side.

You can be proud of someone and want the best for someone, but then you can have an agenda that can impose an expectation on them. These paradoxes can coexist, and within that is the most interesting stuff. It’s where the stakes are, and if there’s something I really appreciate about Jim, it’s his interest in the messy stuff. He lets you admire Pete Seeger for the things that are great about Pete Seeger, and he lets you admire Bob Dylan. It’s like the Beatles breaking up. Not every alliance lasts. And it’s poignant, but it doesn’t mean it’s not good.

I’m curious about the way you approached Pete’s voice, his speaking patterns—there’s a softness to him. I feel like you don’t get to play that very often.

Yeah, but I never end up comparing things. In The Painted Veil , I played someone who was much more tucked-in. Death to Smoochy is very connected to Pete Seeger. I think Smoochy the Rhino and Pete have a lot in common actually. [ Laughs ] But yeah, I loved Pete’s frequency. He’s a very unusual person. He feels like a person out of time. Like Gandalf. I’ll run with this: If you think of the whole thing as The Fellowship of the Ring , and Dylan as Frodo, then Pete is the Gandalf of this group. He knew things, he was the wizard, and they all revered him in a lot of ways and relied on him. But Frodo still has to lead and go to Mordor.