Johnny Depp: From hellraiser to family man
From Edward Scissorhands to Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp has personified strangeness. Elaine Lipworth speaks to Hollywood's hottest oddball
Published: 21 September 2006
Johnny Depp is invariably late for interviews. But Hollywood's most enigmatic
leading man gets away with it - his tardiness heightens the expectation. And
when he finally saunters in to the Beverly Hills hotel suite, Depp is in
good spirits, self-effacing and friendly. "Sorry I'm late - yet again,"
he beams, with a mock sigh and a flash of gold pirate teeth, which does
nothing to detract from his mercurial good looks. "It's pathological,"
he says, with a raised eyebrow, looking and sounding not in the least bit
guilty.
Once famously moody and antagonistic, these days the actor is calm and playful. He's more than happy to discuss his metamorphosis from art-house actor to Hollywood heart-throb, and the transformation from hellraiser to family man. He talks about a "rebirth", which he says stems from his relationship with the singer Vanessa Paradis, and their two children, Lily Rose, seven, and Jack, four.
"When Vanessa found out she was pregnant with our first child -- you start thinking about the future," he says. "Then, boom, there's your baby." He swirls his arms around then taps his fist on the table. "The same moment that your child is born, you're born again, you're brand-new. Vanessa and the kids have revealed me to me," says Depp thoughtfully, stroking his goatee then taking a swig of coffee from a flask. "It's been liberating having a family, miraculous." Johnny Depp is 43. "Everything changed once I held my daughter in my arms. Until that moment, I had been possessed with me. Suddenly, there was someone who depended on me. It was like some veil had been lifted and I suddenly had clarity."
Depp's voice is soft and gentle, an undulating lilt that sounds oddly Irish at times. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with thick horn-rimmed glasses, the name of his son tattooed on his arm, he has a heavy silver chain around his neck and a watch set in a wide leather wristband. He looks stylish, but it's his own idiosyncratic brand of rock-star elegance: Depp may look like an irreverent rocker, but he sounds more like a sedate married man.
"I welcome getting older, it's great." He rocks back on his chair. "I know at a certain point, your back starts to go out on you every day, you start to walk funny, your ear lobe falls off. But it doesn't worry me."
It seems incongruous to equate this reflective actor with the notorious firebrand who used to tear up hotel rooms and dated a string of celebrities from Winona Ryder to Kate Moss. "Actually I was never as wild as they said," he says "But I still have the rage. The rage is built in; it's part of your upbringing, part of your conditioning but it's not as prominent these days," says Depp. "Playing characters like Captain Jack certainly gives you the opportunity to relieve yourself of that pent-up stuff."
Born in Kentucky, the youngest of four children, his parents, John, an engineer, and Betty Sue, a waitress, split up when he was 15, after years of fighting. He does confess that his childhood, spent moving around Florida, was difficult. "By the time I was 16, we had lived in something like 35 houses, we were total nomads, like gypsies, and that's kind of ingrained into my psyche. I can't stand being in one spot for too long." As a teenager, Depp says he felt "different". Some of his best roles have been outsiders, including Edward Scissorhands, Gilbert Grape, Hunter S Thompson and Willy Wonka.
"It's always been good fun playing those characters because they're people who can do things I would never dream of doing, or speak to people that I could never bring myself to."
Depp's fascination for the unusual side of humanity has its roots in his unsettled childhood. "Growing up, I had a sneaking suspicion that it was OK to be different, but there's this fear - nobody wants to be considered crazy or weird," he says, "so they do their best to hide their individuality. It's one of the main things you try to instil in your children: that it is OK to maintain your sense of yourself and your integrity. I always had a fairly strong sense of myself." Depp dreamed of being a rock guitarist, not an actor: "Nothing could make me deviate from that road. Music is still a big part of my life."
At 16, he dropped out of school to play guitar and moved to Los Angeles. Briefly married when he was 20, he couldn't make a living as a musician and resorted to a variety of jobs including a stint as a ballpoint pen salesman. A serendipitous meeting with Nicolas Cage led to a suggestion that Depp try his hand at acting. The actor still maintains that his career initially took off only because he couldn't think of anything better to do. There were appearances in Platoon and A Nightmare on Elm Street. Then Depp landed the TV role that first made him famous, as a cop on 21 Jump Street. "It was great training, but they kept pushing me in a direction that I didn't want to be involved with," he says. "I hated being a product on someone else's terms. I swore to myself back then that I would do the things I wanted to. If I failed, I failed and if it worked, it worked."
Depp's long-term partnership with the director Tim Burton has been a key to the direction of his unusual career. "Tim's a genius," he says, "and that's not a word you throw around lightly." The two have worked together five times. The first, Edward Scissorhands, in 1990 became a cult classic. "Each time out of the gate with Tim is an education," Depp says. "Working with him always feels like home, because you can take a risk and not worry that you've gone too far."
It has always been Depp's ability to immerse himself in every character, that has made him stand out. "I don't know how I do it," he says with a shrug. "I think it's gathering little gems from wherever you find them in life and storing them up to use at a later date. I find people and behaviour fascinating, so I steal things and incorporate them into my characters. The most important responsibility for an actor is observation."
With no desire to be a mainstream actor, Depp deliberately ignored conventional career advice. In the Nineties, when his contemporaries were angling for bigger and more lucrative movies, it appeared that Depp was trying his best not to be a star. He turned down Brad Pitt's role in Thelma and Louise as well as Tom Cruise's part in Interview with the Vampire. Although he was experiencing rapid rise to stardom, he took projects that were practically guaranteed to be flops - Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (booed at its premiere) and Emir Kusturica's Arizona Dream (the critics loved it but few people saw it). When movies did make money, such as Donnie Brasco, it was purely coincidence as far as Depp was concerned.
"With all my characters, it has to come from somewhere inside me," he says. "When I read a script I get images and ideas just come to me. Sometimes they are images of other people - like when I was reading Sleepy Hollow it was Angela Lansbury. And when I was first reading Pirates I started thinking of pirates as rock stars of the time, like Keith Richards, because their legends arrived in places long before they did."
In the past three years, Depp has come to terms with fame. The original Pirates of the Caribbean grossed more than £400m worldwide and the sequel will almost certainly exceed that. Now Depp is courted by studio executives who previously regarded him as a talented maverick. But there are no apologies for making three films based on a Disney theme-park ride. "I don't think I sold out. Doing the Pirates of the Caribbean films is totally consistent with everything I've ever done since Cry-Baby," he says referring to one of his early movies with film-maker John Waters. "I haven't changed any of my processes or beliefs. I'm still dedicated to the same things in my work."
Unintentionally, then, one single, inspired, Oscar-nominated performance as Captain Jack Sparrow has propelled Depp from cult star to cultural icon in three years. He's bought his own Caribbean island and, with $15m pay cheques, can easily afford his luxurious lifestyle, splitting his time between the south of France and Los Angeles. Yet he seems genuinely unaffected.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is another colossally expensive, swashbuckling rollercoaster. And once again, Depp is luminous as the flamboyant and subversive Captain Jack Sparrow, with thick mascara, long matted hair, gold teeth, plaited beard and hippy jewellery. The character continues to be inspired by Depp's friend Keith Richards, who is set to have a cameo in Pirates III as Captain Jack's father. "The amount of fun that I have playing this character is borderline criminal," he says with a gleeful, slightly demonic grin. "There were moments on the first film where you went: 'Man, we're getting paid for this', and it was even better this time. Pirates make us feel like kids again. That level of freedom and irreverence is very appealing."
Depp is making The Rum Diary, based on Hunter S Thompson's book. Then he's hoping to reunite with Tim Burton on a film version of Stephen Sondheim's musical adaptation of Sweeney Todd.
"I believe it's so important to challenge yourself. It's easy to be complacent and stick to a formula and say: 'Well, this is my niche and this works.' There are times when I read a script and I think it's really good, but if I don't think there's anything I can add, I go on to the next thing. It's important as an actor to keep pushing and learning and trying new things that maybe haven't been done so much - to teeter on the brink of absolute failure and flopdom, I think." He laughs. "I can always pump gas or sell pens again."
He grins as a team of publicists arrive to whisk him away. He seems in no hurry to leave. "I know exactly what I want. Everything. Calm, peace, tranquillity, freedom, fun, happiness. If I could make all that one word, I would - a many-syllabled word."
With that, he grabs his flask, takes another swig of coffee and ambles out of the room. "I'll be early next time," he says and bursts out laughing, knowing perfectly well there's no chance of that happening.
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