Johnny Depp Zone Interview Archive

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Not “Blockbuster Boy”

“I’m not ‘Blockbuster Boy.’ I never wanted to be. I’m not looking for that,” Johnny Depp explained to a writer in 1997. While turning down leading roles in box-office bonanzas like Interview with the Vampire (Tom Cruise eventually played Lestat), Legends of the Fall (the romantic lead went to Brad Pitt), and Speed (which put Keanu Reeves on the A-list), Johnny appeared in six major films between 1994 and 1997 . . . and the most mainstream of these—1995’s Nick of Time, in which Johnny plays a desperate father caught up in a political assassination plot—is the least interesting.

Far more memorable were Johnny’s trio of performances opposite older actors who played mentor-figures to his characters. 1994’s Ed Wood, which reunited Johnny with director Tim Burton, showcased the friendship between Johnny, as movie director Ed Wood, and Martin Landau, as washed-up actor Bela Lugosi; Landau won an Oscar. Don Juan DeMarco (1995) gave Johnny the opportunity to work with Marlon Brando, while the somber Mafia saga Donnie Brasco (1997), pitted Al Pacino, as an aging mobster, against Johnny’s undercover F.B.I. agent.

In Jim Jarmusch’s cult classic Dead Man (1995), Johnny plays an innocent young man who comes west for a much-needed accounting job and becomes an accidental outlaw; the movie’s exploration of a man who only begins to live when he knows he is dying is echoed in The Brave (1997), directed by Johnny and co-written by him and his brother D.P. But while Dead Man’s William Blake is a loner among strangers, The Brave’s Raphael is driven by his love for his family.

Love and death are also constant preoccupations whenever the writers turn to Johnny’s personal life: his tempestuous relationship with Kate Moss; the death of River Phoenix outside the Viper Room on Halloween night, 1993; Johnny’s admitted tendency toward “self-medication.” He is obviously not the happiest man in Hollywood. “I have demons,” Johnny confesses to Vanity Fair. And what does the most brilliant and adventurous actor of his generation look forward to having someday? “Peace of mind.”

--Part-Time Poet