Ed Norton on Leaves of Grass and Platonic ideals worth toking.
Norton savored the opportunity to help Nelson make classic thought witty, sexy and thrilling, even in a lecture hall. But the star got his biggest kicks from moments when the black-sheep brother, Brady, one-ups his sibling. "I think Brady, as the movie intimates, is smarter than he sometimes lets on. I really enjoy the moments when Brady is very conscientiously winding his brother up a little bit, saying things like 'Heidegegger' when he knows full well who Heidegger was. One thing that really makes me smile is when Brady pretends he's hunting for a word like epistemology when he probably knows the Oxford English Dictionary definition of it. He gets Billy's goat."
Bill and Brady were going to look even more alike until Norton was flipping through a book and saw a picture of a relaxed, hand-cut Tom Petty circa 1997.
"I just started staring at it. I said I think Brady might have to go a little farther astray in his look than we were imagining. Yet the thing about twins is that, despite superficial differences, they are so much the same. The truth is, Brady is very much like Bill. Brady, too, is a classicist. He says, 'I don't go in for digital' — he has his own classical aesthetic. And with his pot-growing he's a purist. He has a Platonic ideal of pot."
