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Might
As Well Jump
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Johnny
Depp came to Los Angeles in the mid-1980s to be a rock-and-roll
musician, not
an actor. He went to his first audition on a whim, at the urging of pal
Nicolas
Cage, and walked out with a featured role in Wes Craven’s
landmark horror film,
A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).
Johnny Depp has been acting ever since.
The
earliest pieces in our archive are newspaper articles from 1987, when
Johnny
had just started work as undercover cop Tom Hanson on the Fox TV series
21 Jump Street. Florida newspapers
proudly play up the “local boy makes good” angle,
and a syndicated TV columnist
interviews the new cop on the block. These articles capture Johnny at a
rare
moment when he is excited about the prospect of playing Hanson and sees
the Jump Street scripts as
affording an
opportunity to help people.
By
1988, Jump Street was a bona fide
hit—the biggest ever on the new Fox network—and
Johnny Depp was a teen idol, a
role he found as humiliating as it was absurd. Magazine articles find
him
mulling the perils of being “a product” and wishing
to put as much distance as
possible between himself and the role that made him famous. In 1989,
deliverance arrived . . . in the person of maverick director John
Waters, who
cast Johnny as the Elvis-like lead in his musical satire Cry-Baby,
which coincidentally happened to spoof celebrity.
The
1989 US Magazine article is the first major profile of Johnny Depp; it
shows a
young actor attempting to leap from TV to feature films, and trying
desperately
to shake off the “teen idol” label that hangs
around his neck like an
albatross. Neither the writer nor Johnny knows if he will succeed.
--Part-Time
Poet
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