The American actor, screenwriter, director and film producer got that information during Tuesday’s episode of the PBS genealogy history show “Finding Your Roots” hosted by historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.
“This makes you realize that you are a small part of the history of humanity”Norton commented after learning about the event during the broadcast of the program.
Gates assured Norton that English settler John Rolfe and Pocahontas were part of his family tree and that his great-grandparents had been married on April 5, 1614 in Virginia.
During the program that is dedicated to tracing the ancestral stories of celebrities, it was also revealed that the actor’s third great-grandfather “Fight Club” (1999), john winsteadowned a family of slaves made up of a man, a woman and five girls.
On this, Norton confessed that he was not proud of that part of his story and that it was something that made him feel “uncomfortable”.
“It is not a judgment on your own life, but it is a judgment on the history of this country and you have to recognize it first of all and then you have to face it (…) When you read ‘eight year slave’ you just want to die“snapped the protagonist of “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”.
Some of the best known works of Edward Norton have been films like Primal Fear (1996), by Gregory Hoblit, his performance as a former neo-Nazi leader in American History X (1998), as well as his participation in the film by Alejandro González Iñárritu, “Birdman” (2014), for which he earned a nomination for awards Oscar respectively.
The entrance Edward Norton discovers his relationship to the real-life Pocahontas was first published on newspaper TODAY.