Why Edward Norton Compared His Primal Fear Audition To The Nirvana Demo Tapes
Gregory Hoblit's 1996 legal thriller "Primal Fear" starred Richard Gere as a hotshot defense attorney who takes high-profile cases just so he can get his clients off on technicalities. He eagerly takes a salacious case involving a mild-mannered young man named Aaron (Edward Norton), who has been arrested for the murder of a local archbishop. As Gere investigates details of the crime, he uncovers multiple sex crimes committed by the archbishop, as well as Aaron's mental illness; he suffers from dissociative identity disorder.
Although Norton had been working in theater for several years, "Primal Fear" was his first film role. Norton, wholly committed to the part — Norton is a notorious proponent of the Stanislavski Technique — brought both timidity and intensity to the role, earning him an Academy Award nomination. The same year, Norton would also appear in the high-profile Woody Allen ensemble comedy "Everyone Says I Love You," and Miloš Forman's Oscar prestige biopic "The People vs. Larry Flynt." Norton was thrust into fame very quickly.
Prior to landing his role in "Primal Fear," however, Norton, like many aspiring young film actors in the 1990s, would send around audition tapes to various studios and casting agencies. Norton filmed himself on VHS performing scenes and giving a sample as to the types of characters he was capable of playing. In a 2019 career retrospective interview with Yahoo, Norton revealed that his audition tapes had reached far more people than he ever intended.
The Nirvana demo tapes
For a little bit of context, the Nirvana demo tapes were cassettes Kurt Cobain handed off to his friend John Purkey back in the late 1980s, back when Nirvana was still a loose collection of teens dreaming of the big time. Purkey was a Tacoma, Washington-based musician who played in multiple bands, including A.T.G., Noxious Fumes, and Subvert, and a friend of Cobain's. In 2018, Spin Magazine published an article about how Purkey rediscovered the cassettes, and many of them can now be heard on YouTube. The cassettes added to a large collection of demo tapes Nirvana recorded regularly, with some being passed around outside the professional music world. While many did eventually see an authorized release — early recordings made their way onto the 2004 box set "With the Lights Out" — more still remained bootlegs.
Norton, only two years younger than Cobain, would have known about the legendary tapes, and their tendency to drift out into the world. The same seems to have happened with his screen test tape. Many people got a copy of Norton's VHS cassette, and he recalls how odd it was that it turned up at showbiz gatherings. From the Yahoo interview:
"People made a big deal of that. It was sort of like the Nirvana demo tape, my screen tests on it. It went around, and I was like 'Why is everybody seeing this? Why am I hearing about people seeing it at, y'know, parties in Hollywood and s*** like that? ... It got hyped up. I did things I always did for auditions. I didn't like chitchat before auditions; I thought it was un-strategic. I thought 'Why would you say "Hi, I'm Edward! I did this! And blah blah. Okay, now let me do the drug addict for this part on 'Law & Order' or whatever'" I thought 'let's talk after,' do you know what I mean? Or not at all."
Why was is spread around?
Edward Norton posited why his screen test was being passed around. Audition tapes wouldn't leave a studio office unless there was something striking or unique. Based on his spartan attitudes toward auditions, Norton thought that he got maybe too much attention:
"I had a habit of trying to get casting directors to just let me come in and do the bit. And it was effective! I had other situations where I felt directors appreciated it, in a way. Not only that it conveyed a seriousness, but it reminded them that's how this works. Let me not have any preconceived things. So it wasn't something I specifically did for that."
Any actor working in Hollywood will likely tell you any number of unwritten rules one must abide by in the audition process, and — going only from anecdotal evidence — being approachable and polite has worked well for many performers in the past. Norton had not pretenses to being polite or impolite. He simply wanted to get down to business. And given the intensity of a role like Aaron in "Primal Fear," the cassette in question likely got traction for how disturbingly authentic it was. Without "chitchat," it's a video of a young man behaving angrily. Raw, unfettered energy, full of rage. Kind of like a Nirvana demo.