Recently, Hollywood star Edward Norton visited the Guinness Storehouse. Before going in, he and his son queued at a nearby coffee kiosk where a distracted young employee looked up from his work, pointed at him and just said, “Onion!” Norton tells this story to an audience of businesspeople in the RDS who are also, no doubt, thinking their own variation of “Onion!” as they gaze up at him.
Norton is very famous. He has starred in American History X, Fight Club, The Incredible Hulk, Birdman, Motherless Brooklyn and the afore-misremembered Glass Onion. He is in the RDS for an AIB Sustainability Conference, to talk about the urgency of climate action and the world-changing potential of environmental businesses.
This is not an unusual forum for him. As well as being an Oscar-nominated actor, he is the United Nations ambassador for biodiversity. He is also the co-founder of the crowdfunding platform Crowdrise, which eventually merged with GoFundMe, Stax, a carbon capture company, Edo, an advertising-related data business, and Conservation Equity, an “Environmental Benefit Corporation”.
Up on stage in a dark jacket and a crisp white shirt, talking to journalist Dearbhail McDonald, Norton often seems more like a charismatic tech entrepreneur than a celebrity. And he is more than just an actorly face for his companies. On the Stax website he’s listed as “chief strategy officer”. On the Edo site he is called “chairman and co-founder”.
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“I’m always a little reluctant to play that game of pretending you can only do one thing in life,” he says later, as we sit in a nicely ornate ante chamber in the RDS. “I just don’t find that to be authentic. Creative life is not a nine-to-five job. It never has been for me and I never really wanted it to be. I’m not knocking people who do three films a year, but it’s never been my relationship to it. I don’t think I can do good work in an industrialised way.
“I think people make the assumption that anyone who’s doing a thing should be maximising it. And it’s a really odd thing, because someone like Daniel Day Lewis – who I mention not just because I deeply admire his work, but because part of the patina of admiration around him is actually based on the fact that he doesn’t work that often and that it has more punching power when he does.” He laughs.
“And yet, despite that, I’ll get these really weird questions, like, ‘Why don’t you work more?’ And I’m always like, ‘Whoever said that this was a volume business?’”
Norton’s father was Edward Mower Norton jnr, an environmental lawyer and conservationist. His grandfather was James Rouse who founded Enterprise Community Partners, a non-profit which provided equitable low-income housing for which Norton worked in his 20s.
So this is a little like a family business? “Not on a business level, necessarily, but on a mission-driven level,” says Norton. “My memory of childhood is full of adults sitting around tables very passionately discussing these issues and what you do about them. And I saw people in my life who were doing things about it ...
“Today a lot of people will use ‘virtue signalling’ as a phrase. The funny thing is, my relationship to this isn’t driven by wanting to be a ‘white knight’. I just think it’s fun. My grandfather and my father and my mother, they always seemed like they were having a ball. And they were never hung up on money ... They just looked like they were having the best time.
“They were adventurous, going out to interesting places, working with interesting people, and that is actually pretty much the way I feel about it ... I really find it to be a pretty juicy, fun reason to get up in the morning. I like the places it takes me, and I like the people I end up working with. They’re very diverse and very, very switched on.”
Some environmentalists see capitalism as the problem. Sally Rooney said as much recently in an essay in this newspaper. Norton doesn’t disagree.
“[For] the first 200 years of industrial economy, we were borrowing against the future,” he says. “There’s a massive bill coming due. It’s the fault of capitalism as expressed to date but it doesn’t mean that instruments of capitalism and entrepreneurialism can’t be harnessed in new ways and reimagined and re-engineered for something that’s holistically more healthy.
“I see kids at polytechnic institutes working on packaging to replace cardboard that’s made from agricultural waste and mycelium mushrooms. When you’re done with it, instead of an Amazon box going to landfill, you could literally throw it on the garden ... The thing that has been the problem [capitalism] has an overweight capacity to be the solution too. But you need a reformation, or a re-engineering of what its ultimate intent is.”
America has become so maximal. The whole culture is just insisting you must and should go for the biggest version of whatever you’re doing
Norton thinks that business and governmental incentives – the short-term obsession with GDP and quarterly profits – have been all wrong. He would like to see society move from “shareholder” capitalism to “stakeholder” capitalism. “And stakeholder has to include the environment and our communities. You can’t just do quarterly-report-driven, short term, shareholder capitalism – that’s just like a cancer.”
His family background seems to explain the entrepreneurialism and the environmentalism, but why did he want to act?
“I had this very powerful reaction to seeing Ian McKellen when I was 16 years old,” he says. “I saw him doing this one-man show that he had written about Shakespeare and his life as an actor in Shakespeare’s texts. He performed bits from the text, but it was a lecture about his life in the theatre and he articulated how it had opened up life to him and given him a wider life and given him more access to himself.
“I was 15 or 16 and I remember floating out of that theatre going, ‘Oh my God, what a great life.’ He made it seem like a life of adventure and fluidity. It seemed like this secret world, where you’re just not in the straight world.”
A banking sustainability conference is very much the straight world, though. He laughs. “This is the straight world for sure,” he says. “I always feel like an interloper. I put on a suit jacket because it’s a bank. I feel like I shouldn’t show up in the techie black hoodie. That’s my conservative Irish roots or something.”
His first successful acting role was actually in an Irish play, Brian Friel’s Lovers, he says. “I did it downtown in East Fourth Street.”
In his early days acting he was still working for his grandfather’s affordable housing company, which was a useful corrective to the theatre. “In the affordable housing finance world they were so devoid of ego, narcissism, ambition for self. They were a great balance to the world of me and my friends in the arts, where at the end of the day it is a little bit ‘look at me’.”
Does he see a connection between his political and social activism and his film work? He didn’t in the past, he says, but that’s changed a bit.
“I went to the Shanghai Film Festival. I had a new film there but they were running a series of my stuff. I don’t read Chinese at all, but I was recognising a block of [text], next to my name, a bunch. And I said to this interpreter, ‘What is that?’ And she said, ‘Oh, it’s the name of your film series.’ And I said, ‘What is the name of my film series?’ She said, ‘The Search for the Spiritual Centre in the New Youth Generation.’” He laughs.
“And I said, ‘The Search for the Spiritual Centre in the New Youth Generation, the films of [Edward Norton]?’” (They were showing films such as Fight Club and American History X). “I thought, ‘That kind of fits.’”
There’s also plenty of political subtext in his more recent movies. In his next big role, he plays banjo-wielding political firebrand Pete Seeger in the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (I’ll spare you our brief discussion of banjo types). Then there’s 2019′s Motherless Brooklyn, which he wrote and directed, and is about slum clearances in the 1950s. It features Alec Baldwin as a very Trumpy version of the infamous urban planner Robert Moses. “Moses was much more sophisticated than Trump,” he says, “but he was a racist real estate developer, so if the shoe fits ...”
In 2022′s Glass Onion, Norton plays a feckless tech billionaire in a hilarious murder mystery that satires wealth and inequality. “Rian [Johnson, the director] is so funny. He called me and said: ‘I know you know these guys.’”
Norton really does know those guys. Does he ever feel ambivalent about being in the room with business moguls, some of whom just want to greenwash and continue burning carbon?
“The best side of it is people who are just coming up with unbelievably brilliant stuff, that’s fully inspiring,” he says. “This thing we’re at [in the RDS] is hardcore institutional, right? But it seems to me that there’s good intention within it. It takes a long time for big institutions to really adopt things, but I don’t think it’s bullshit. It’s important to get people in the room to talk about this stuff.”
And what about more cynical operators?
“Some people need to be called out,” he says. “Others are trying to grade inflate their contribution – call it greenwashing, call it grade inflation. Sometimes it’s pernicious. Sometimes it’s lazy. And I think sometimes there’s good intention, and people just need to see that they could go a little harder or a little further ...
“To the degree that I’m able to spot the worst end of that spectrum, I try to call it out any opportunity I get. Look at Elon Musk. You can never take away that he accelerated the electrification of transportation by decades. One hundred per cent he did that.
“But it’s incredibly disingenuous that he doesn’t acknowledge the degree to which he’s the ultimate government trust fund baby. He built [Tesla] off a loan [of $465 million from the US department of energy]. And he’ll say, ‘Yeah, but we paid it back.’ Yes, but you got it. And if you took the government rebates for electric cars out of the equation, Tesla would be insolvent. And he’s a government contractor with Space X so why flay government?”
He notes how Trump hired both Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to advise him on cutting government agents and laughs darkly. “I mean, it’s like an Onion headline, Trump inaugurates ‘department of government efficiency’ by hiring two people for the same job.”
How did he feel after the election of Trump, a man who promised to “drill baby drill” for more fossil fuels?
“I had a psychological dip before the election,” he says. “I’d been out of the United States all summer. I finished doing the film about Dylan. Then [we were] in Europe a good bit and then in Canada. And when I came back to the US in September, I felt the aggression of the US, not just the political divisiveness.
“America has become so maximal. The whole culture is just insisting you must and should go for the biggest version of whatever you’re doing. It’s kind of that thing we were talking about earlier, about acting: When did it become a volume game?”
He doesn’t just think that this narrow, acquisitive approach to life is bad for the environment. He also thinks it’s bad for the people pursuing it.
I fundamentally disagree with anybody who points a finger at Greta and her generation and calls them ‘strident’, ‘unsophisticated’, ‘loud’
“The more I see someone going for the biggest version of whatever they’re doing, the narrower their life actually is,” he says. “And some of that narrowness is what is, I think, producing a lack of empathy. These are people aren’t actually even seeing the wider experience of other people any more. They have this almost Nietzschean like ‘will to power’ ...
“There’s that line in Nietzsche, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where he says, ‘Some people threw off their only value when they shrugged off the yoke.’ I actually think a lot of these tech overlords have just decided that the best value of most people is to be feedstock for their algorithms ... I’ve heard them say it. They believe that as the implementers of capital toward the multi-planetary future, or whatever the f**k it is they think they’re doing, that environmentalism or social consciousness [is] all just a drag on their enterprise.”
And in this dark moment, he says, there needs to be a fight back. He sees his environmental entrepreneurialism as being allied with more on-the-streets activists like Greta Thunberg.
“I fundamentally disagree with anybody who points a finger at Greta and her generation and calls them ‘strident’, ‘unsophisticated’, ‘loud’. I just couldn’t disagree more. I think that young people being strident on this topic is absolutely logical and essential and one should hold almost nothing but admiration for young people getting engaged.
“From people throwing paint on art, to interrupting play performances, if you find it inconvenient, I think that’s precisely the f**king point. It’s like Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman: ‘Attention must be paid.’”
It’s a crucial point in history, he says. “Nobody should be telling anybody to shut up and go to school or to shut up and act.”
