Edward Norton Makes "Uncomfortable" Discovery: His Ancestors Once Owned Slaves

Edward Norton’s ancestors once owned slaves. 

The Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery actor made this startling discovery on PBS’ Finding Your Roots, a show where celebs unearth untold stories of their pedigree.

In a preview of an upcoming episode (per Metro), historian and host Henry Louis Gates Jr broke the news Norton by showing him a photo of a family of slaves, presumably owned by Norton’s forebears.

“What’s it like to see that?” Gates asked Norton.

“The short answer is, these things are uncomfortable, and you should be uncomfortable with them. Everybody should be uncomfortable with it,” Norton, 53, responded.

“It’s not a judgment on you and your own life but it’s a judgment on the history of this country. It needs to be acknowledged first and foremost, and then it needs to be contended with.”

Norton added: “When you go away from census counts and you personalise things, you’re talking about, possibly, a husband and wife with five girls — and these girls are slaves. Born into slavery.”

Gates: “Born into slavery and in slavery in perpetuity.”

Norton: “Yeah. Again, when you read ‘slave aged eight,’ you just want to die.”

Norton’s grandfather, James Rouse, was a businessman and a real-estate mogul behind Rouse Company, a now-defunct shopping mall developer.

Revelations of Norton’s checkered genealogy past come amid recent reports of Benedict Cumberbatch’s family facing a compensation claim in Barbados over his slave-owning ancestors.

The Doctor Strange actor’s seventh great-grandfather, Abraham, once owned a sugar plantation in 1728. It was home to 250 slaves before it was shut down when slavery was abolished in the 1830s.

The Cumberbatch family was said to be compensated with £6,000, which is equivalent to about £3.6 million (S$5.8 mil) today.

In 2015, The Sherlock star shared that his mother tried to persuade him not to use his real name as an actor over concerns about the family's slavery ties.

Cumberbatch played a plantation owner in the Oscar-winning 2013 drama 12 Years A Slave. He also portrayed slave trade abolitionist William Pitt the Younger in the 2006 movie Amazing Grace, about the battle to outlaw slavery in Britain.

According to The Daily Mail, Cumberbatch saw the Pitt role as “a sort of apology” for his family’s role in the slave trade.

Norton isn’t the only actor whose family’s slavery legacy is ‘outed’ by Finding Your Roots.

In 2015, Ben Affleck tried to remove information about a slave-owning ancestor from an episode of Finding Your Roots. When word got out (via Sony leaked e-mail scandal), the Oscar-winning actor issued an apology on his Facebook page.

“After an exhaustive search of my ancestry for Finding Your Roots, it was discovered that one of my distant relatives was an owner of slaves,” Affleck wrote. “I didn’t want any television show about my family to include a guy who owned slaves. I was embarrassed. The very thought left a bad taste in my mouth.”

Photo: TPG News/Click Photos

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