By Gayl Murphy

HOLLYWOOD — You wouldn’t think Edward Norton, star of nearly 20 feature films, was shy.

But as a teenager, Norton, who has since been nominated for two Oscars for “American History X” and “Primal Fear,” was initially self-conscious about acting.

“I didn’t want girls to see me in a play,” he said.

Things changed when a class field trip took the 16-year-old Norton to Washington D.C. to view Ian McKellen’s one-man’s show.

“It had a huge impact on me,” Norton told Hollywood Today. “Right at that moment in my life, it struck me for the first time that there was something really deep about acting.

Growing up in an urban environment, Norton also found himself moved by works such as Spike Lee’s “Do The Right Thing.”

“I’ve always been interested in telling stories that are about the dysfunctions or the challenges of what your generation is experiencing,” the actor said.

Norton later went on to graduate from Yale, where the “The Italian Job” star has since established the Edward Norton fellowship for Middle Eastern studies.

“People at 18 or 19 are just figuring out what interests them,” Norton said, “so I wanted to create an opportunity for them to study the people and cultures of the Middle East as well.”

The program gives five grants to five students a year, allowing them to travel to the Middle East during the summer to live with families and study local culture and language.

“Someone wrote their dissertation on the Lebanese women’s movement,” Norton said, “It’s facilitating those kinds of investigations for young people.”

In his latest film “The Illusionist,” Norton plays Eisenheim, a magician in 19th century Vienna. A fan of magic since childhood, Norton believes that even in this day and age, audiences can still be fooled by illusionists.

“In the modern world, we’re getting used to seeing things that are impossible and it gets harder to do that to people…to give them that experience where they’re sort of really flummoxed, where they’ve seen something and it throws them out of joint for a second.”

Norton’s character in the film succeeds in transfixing his audiences, forcing them to question whether or not Eisenheim is dabbling in mystical powers. Norton plays opposite young actress Jessica Biel, who he says many deemed the “7th Heaven” television star a surprising choice for the period film.

“I wasn’t really up on Jessica’s career. She had a couple of people looking and asking, ‘Oh, that’s that girl from TV, why is she in this period drama?’ But she was wonderful. To me, her face is not really modern. When she put on all those clothes, she looked like one of those Slavic princesses.”

Eisenheim fights for true love in “The Illusionist,” a quality which Norton laments the loss of in the modern age.

“Our culture is so sexualized now,” Norton said. “In those times, you couldn’t express yourself on a billboard with your shirt off. Romantic intensity was channeled into much narrower bands of expression. The idea of love being expressed through these tightly cordoned channels of what was proper…it’s great. We’ve gained something by being more liberated sexually, but there’s something charged about (the limits of sex from those times) that we don’t have anymore.”\

Currently, Norton is co-producing an upcoming HBO miniseries on explorers Lewis & Clark with good friend Brad Pitt.

“We haven’t worked together since “Fight Club,” but it’s great to know somebody over time. Everybody grows up, and your political consciousness evolves,” Norton said.”

The pair felt the story, which is based on Stephen Ambrose’s book “Undaunted Courage,” was too epic to encompass in a film. “We looked at the way HBO was handling these big event miniseries like “Band of Brothers” and we thought it was the best thing going on out there for the presentation for the literary approach to telling stories or the grand epic.”

Next, Norton will produce and star in a drama romance set in China dubbed “The Painted Veil,” opposite Naomi Watts. “Pride and Glory” will later feature Norton as a police officer in a family torn apart by a corruption scandal.