Edward Norton has to admit he likes playing the bad guy role. Except he’s not quite ready to say his character, Colonel Eric Byer, is the villain in the latest entry in the Bourne series.
“I’m not sure my guy is the bad guy,” he told The Independent. “He thinks there is a practical necessity to his actions which fulfill a nobler ambition.”
Despite his role in The Bourne Legacy, Norton confesses, “The truth about making an action film is that it can be fun, but it can also be really tiresome. It might make a very exciting scene as a whole but the doing of it can be very technical and fragmented as a process. I see it as more of an endurance challenge rather than anything to do with acting.”
Norton does say that he respects The Bourne Legacy writer and director Tony Gilroy. “But I like what Tony has done,” he said. “He’s created a dark, dark world for me to explore here.”
And above all, Norton has to “be challenged. I like things that are unfamiliar, worlds that I haven’t knocked around in before,” he said. “And I like to align myself with whatever is good that is going on.”
The Bourne Legacy hits theaters August 10.
