Edward Norton Found the Keys to Pete Seeger in ‘A Complete Unknown’: His Music Was Intricate and His Toilet Smelled

There’s a priceless moment early in “A Complete Unknown” when folk icon Pete Seeger returns to the cabin where he lives with his family after offering a young singer named Bob Dylan a place to sleep for the night. Seeger shows Dylan around the house, proudly displaying the modern amenities of the rustic abode. But when he talks about how the wondrous new composting toilet doesn’t even stink, his kids chime in from the next room: Yes, Dad, it does!

The moment is quintessential Pete Seeger, a man who wore the same gentle smile whether he was leading sing-alongs or facing adversity that included a lengthy period in the 1950s where he was blacklisted after being at the height of his popularity with the folk group The Weavers. Seeger’s essential goodness always stood out, wrote Elijah Wald in “Dylan Goes Electric!,” the book that served as the inspiration for “A Complete Unknown.” In Edward Norton’s uncanny performance as Seeger, we see the goodness and the smile, but also the strain it takes to always be so good and positive, even about things like bathroom aromas.

“Pete’s daughters, who are in their 70s and 80s, told me about that,” Norton said, beaming. “They said there had been this period when they got this composting toilet and that their dad was always saying, ‘It’s so amazing!’ But they said it always smelled.”

That scene illustrated one of the joys of “A Complete Unknown” to Norton, who came on when Benedict Cumberbatch had to drop out for scheduling reasons after the end of the actors’ strike. Director James Mangold brought Norton in to join a cast that included Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez and Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, a fictionalized version of Dylan’s first New York girlfriend, Suze Rotolo.

Mangold, Norton said, gave him orders that the actor loved: “He said, ‘Please go out and mine Pete Seeger and bring me back a bunch of gold.’” Norton watched everything he could get his hands on (an easier task in the age of YouTube), talked to friends and family and suggested additions like the toilet exchange and the fact that Seeger’s kitchen appliances were painted what the socialists of the era called “Freedom Red.”

“I told Jim that the day before we shot in the cabin, and he immediately had the refrigerator and the stove painted red,” he said.

Before getting the part, Norton had been familiar with Seeger’s music, which popularized folk to a broader audience throughout the 1950s and helped pave the way for the success of the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary and ultimately Dylan in the ’60s. And from living in New York, he knew Seeger as an “Olympian” of the left, active in social and environmental causes until his death in 2014.

The revelations, though, came when he explored the dark days of Seeger’s career, when his socially conscious music inspired by the likes of Woody Guthrie helped put him in the crosshairs of an America obsessed with rooting out and blacklisting communists, socialists and leftists.

“You can’t understand what was going on with him in the early ’60s unless you understand that he played summer camps for 10 years for 20 bucks,” Norton said. “He was as far out in the cold as someone who had been famous with the Weavers could be. But he kept the flame alive, and Joan Baez and Peter Yarrow and Bob Dylan say that seeing Seeger in the ’50s was part of why they became folk musicians.

“In the ’60s, he’s reaping what he sowed through a very rough period. If you don’t understand that, you can’t understand the layers of emotion in the wonderful period from ’62 to ’64, where it feels like days of heaven to him.”

Like Chalamet and Barbaro, Norton sings and plays his character’s songs himself — and he nails it, though he was surprised to discover what the toughest part of the job would be. “You gotta get the music right,” he said. “That’s the gig. And Peter Yarrow said to me the thing about Pete Seeger is that he sang the song three times at the same time: He sang it, taught it to you and then harmonized with you once he taught it to you.

“With something like ‘Wimoweh,’ he would tune in an open tuning so that there was at least one chord where he could take his hand off the guitar neck and conduct the audience. He makes it look effortless, but then you realize that he’s singing a part, taking his hand off the guitar and conducting, coming back on, picking it up, telling people what to do, guiding them through it, singing another line…”

He shook his head. “And he does all that while maintaining breath control and sounding great. When you start trying to do it, you realize how much interactive choreography is going on and how really, really difficult it is.”

The performance and the film, he added, “meant a lot to me,” especially coming in a film that had its doubters from the start. “I liked even the slight frisson of doubt, of Should we be doing this?” he said. “But Jim was so persuasive that he was not going to make a biopic. He was going to look at the collisions that made the stakes so high in that cultural moment.

“His thing was, ‘Dylan goes electric. Why did anybody care? Why were there any stakes to that?’ And he back-built from that to look at the anthropological stew that was going on.”

This story first appeared in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.

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