The
Johnny Depp Zone
Interview
Archive
2 0 0 6
Depp
Thoughts
by
Tom Carson
photo
by Annie Leibovitz
GQ
Magazine
July
2006
For
more than two decades,
Johnny Depp has stubbornly pursued the unconventional life and dodged
the death
trap of teen idolhood. Tom Carson explains how he does it.
A
COUPLE OF YEARS AGO,
with that pugnacious
modesty of his, Johnny Depp told an interviewer that Tom Cruise was a
great
movie star. Presumably, Cruise fans beamed fondly and the rest of you
yawned,
but I was taken aback. 
Lord
knows Depp has never been Mr. Etiquette,
but it’s
not like him to be so rude.
More
in character is how
compulsively he defines himself by omission. Though he usually stops
short of
belittling his contemporaries by name, Johnny’s low opinion
of stardom for its own
sake isn’t exactly a secret. He’s the kind of actor
who’s almost as famous for
what he refuses to do as for what he does, and ever since he evaded
teen-idol
status by bolting Fox’s 21 Jump
Street
in 1989, his allergy to courting our approval has rivaled the average
imam’s
reaction to an all-pork diet. Since ingratiating himself not only is
Cruise’s
definition of stardom but also often seems to be his definition of
acting, you
see the point: If a great movie star is what Tom is, Depp must be
something else—the
anti-Cruise, if only by implication.
At
the time, he had a
pressing reason to remind us of the distinction—namely, the
success of an
esoteric little art flick called Pirates
of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. After years
of following
his bliss in acting jobs so wayward that bizzers had dubbed him
box-office
poison, Depp was playing in Cruise’s league—and
beating him, with a disarmingly
good-natured summer blockbuster whose ticket sales topped the combined
receipts
for The Last Samurai and Collateral.
If only Captain Jack had
somehow found time to rescue Katie Holmes from Scientology.
With
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s
Chest out this month and a
third installment in the can, Depp has become the main attraction in
his
first-ever franchise. His elegantly wrecked, sashaying impersonation of
Keith
Richards OD’ing on Froot Loops was so unquestionably the
making of Pirates that the industry
responded with
a rare accolade: a Best Actor nomination for a kiddie film. To
understand how
fluke transformed Depp’s relationship with the big public,
try to imagine the
impact on Marlon Brando’s fortunes if
his song-and-dance turn
in 1955’s Guys and Dolls
had left audiences baying
for more.
Invoking
Brando’s ghost
cuts just about every actor down to size. But
Depp, who benefited from
the
elderly 
Brando’s
on-set tutorials when they costarred in Don
Juan DeMarco, is
one of the few
performers who don’t instantly
shrivel under the comparison. That’s why his career is our
era’s best index to
a truth Sean Penn has yet to latch onto, which is that the next Brando
(d’oh!)
won’t be anything like the old one.
The
differences between
Depp and his onetime mentor are obvious. One was a testosterone opera;
the
other is haiku. Brando’s agonized rendition of postwar
masculinity incarnated
grand-scale possibilities, while Depp is a one-man subculture, a
specialist in
marginalia and off-topic kerfuffle.
Yet
they’re similarly unpredictable, similarly unconcerned with
traditional notions
of what Great Acting should look like, and similarly inventive in
finding ways
of getting inside a character’s skin while also reminding us
we’re forever
outside it.
Even
in
inconsequential parts, Depp never seems trivial
or banal, and there’s a reason for that. Tom Cruise may
qualify as a fairly
perplexing human being, but his screen persona’s main virtue
is its legibility.
Depp’s presence, on the other hand, can charge almost any
movie with intangible
meaning—even one as blatantly meaningless as Secret
Window. 
Following
him from role to role is like
watching a
firefly play chess.
He
might have been happier
torching the joint, but times change and you can’t have
everything. Being
tangential beats being irrelevant, and Depp’s fey gambits and
recusals make the
most sense as an imaginative way of adapting to and dissenting from a
culture
where the rebel tradition he identifies with is so commodified
it’s only in
demand as a charade. Let’s not forget that he was once
romantic enough to
imagine that the Viper Room, his L.A. nightclub, might bring back the
glamour
of Hollywood’s louche heyday. It got famous instead when
River Phoenix died on
its sidewalk, and to his credit, Depp never tells journalists what they
want to
hear about that, which was that it was a turning point for him;
he talks about Phoenix’s
talent instead. But even if he went
on unrepentantly indulging for some years afterward, he clearly gave up
on the
idea of presiding over any kind of rebirth of cool.
The
form his rebellion
eventually took is more surreptitious, since its' only constants are
his
mistrust of heroism and pleasure in undermining traditional images of
male
forcefulness with flutters of inadequacy or flagrant effeminacy.
It’s not for
nothing that he first came into his own as the grotesque, gentle,
semiandrogynous hero of Tim Burton’s Edward
Scissorhands. Dedicated heterosexual though he’s
known to be offscreen,
Depp the actor is nonetheless liberated enough to revel in raiding gay
sensibility for insights and surprises, from his candidly girlie
Ichabod Crane
in Sleepy Hollow to his startling
cameo as an obscenely sexy transvestite in Before
Night Falls. 
One
reason women may respond to him more than
men is that,
even in relatively straightforward parts, he incorporates female
perceptions
into his work—sometimes seductively, sometimes with perverse
innocence.
Every
once in a while,
he’ll let a director use those sculpted cheekbones and foxy
eyes of his the way
Mother Nature intended directors to use them, as in his preposterous
but
satisfying role as the river-rat dreamboat in Lasse
Hallstrom’s Chocolat. But
left to his own devices,
clearly his favorite work mode, Depp’s first priority is
usually to contrive to
make his looks irrelevant, leaving him free to explore the modern
varieties of
inner and outer deformity-isolation, emotional ineptitude, monomania,
infantilism—whether or not they’re lurking in the
script. Because he’s
intrinsically funny and his wit adds perspective, he’s almost
never as mawkish
as that catalog implies. But even Captain Jack in Pirates,
his most lighthearted part ever, is a covertly touching
study in loneliness.
Even
so, it’s not entirely
Hollywood’s fault that Depp spent most of the ‘90s
acting in movies whose main
interest was his presence in them. After Edward
Scissorhands, he was in demand to play adolescent or
post-adolescent
misfits: the reluctant linchpin of a dysfunctional family in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,
the
porkpie-hatted Buster Keaton fan courting a mental-ward sprite in Benny & Joon, and so on. Not all
of
these deserved the skill Depp brought to them, but taken as refracted
autobiography, what’s most revealing about his early roles is
how persistently
they champion bizarre fantasy lives as antidotes of reality’s
drabness.
Depp
has never
abandoned that theme,
or maybe I mean outgrown it. Witness his
heartfelt J.M. Barrie two years ago in Finding
Neverland, a movie that uses one kind of ickiness
(make-believe as kiddie
pseudo-spiritualism) to distract us from another (the creepy undertow
of
Barrie’s thwarted-to-nonexistent sexuality). As Depp passed
30, though, his
disconcertingly unchanged pretty-boy face, along with his aversion to
anything
that might smack of endorsing normality, made him harder to cast, not
that the
industry didn’t try. 
He
turned down the leads in both Speed
and Titanic.
But
anyone who believes that “uncommercial” always
equals “artistic” has to face
how often the famously offbeat, intriguing choices Depp opted for
instead wound
up letting him give fascinating performances in offbeat, intriguing
crap. Next
to The Ninth Gate, Speed
doesn’t look half bad.
It’s
anyone’s guess how
much he cares, since he’s often seemed indifferent to a
project’s mediocrity so
long as his own part lets him experiment with new ways of hiding and
finding
Johnny. What’s exasperating is that his acting instincts are
as marvelous, and
his commitment to each role as intense, as his judgment of material is
iffy.
Depp has no formal training, but he’s got a
remarkable—and most often
justified—trust in his own intuitions; no other actor gets so
much subtext out
of using his hands to choreograph misgivings and treating bad haircuts
as the
soul’s antennae. His real originality, however, is that his
ideal of
performance seems to be in imagining what his characters are like when
they’re
alone in a room. By his lights, interaction is always
a compromise—a faltering
or baroque rendition of a true self that stays secret.
As
acting, this is often
riveting. As a predilection, it has limits. Perhaps so few of
Depp’s ‘90s
vehicles connected with audiences because of his noninterest in
portraying
relationships: friendships, family ties, workplace attachments, and so
on. When
he isn’t adding unrequited depth to muddled thrillers or
incarnating oddball
frailty in Tim Burton’s latest hymn to it, he’s
been most drawn to roles that
let him explore an unusual fascination with depravity—in
Terry Gilliam’s
adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas, as the dealer in Blow,
as
the Earl of Rochester in the recent The
Libertine. What all these parts have in common is that they
let him stay
solitary, unattached, benignly or ominously special.
His
collaborations with
Burton aside, Depp hasn’t had great luck working with name
directors. He was
smart to erase the 21 Jump Street
stigma by parodying a ‘50s bad boy in John Water’s Cry-Baby, but Cry-Baby
inaugurated Water’s decline into avuncular sentimentality.
Later,
Depp took on The
Ninth Gate
to work with Roman
Polanski, but Polanski, then in his pre-The
Pianist schlockmeister mode, was probably just stunned that
his star didn’t
share his own evident contempt for the material. As for Fear
and Loathing, not only was Gilliam the wrong director for it,
but Depp gave one of his rare misconceived performances. Trying to
measure up
to one of his idols, he caught Hunter S. Thompson’s outer
shell perfectly but
clearly didn’t feel at liberty to offer a single insight into
Thompson that
Hunter himself wouldn’t endorse.
Only
Jim Jarmusch’s
wonderful Dead Man, with Depp doing
the real Buster Keaton homage for which Benny
& Joon had been a warm-up, stands out from the list,
and the audience
for Dead Man could comfortably hold
reunions in an elevator. It may be no wonder if he came to prefer
working for
undemanding directors who would let him be the auteur of his own
performance,
if not the film. You’d love to see what Wes Anderson, say, or
Nicole Holofeener
might do with him, but that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.
Nor with the major
exception of Donnie Brasco—which
he
knew was Al Pacino’s movie and played without adding any
idiosyncrasies of his
own—has Depp shown any interest in testing himself against
costars whose
charisma and talent might match his. He really is a one-man band.
Indeed,
one reason he’s
been Tim Burton’s favorite leading man is clearly that
Burton, who has no great
skill with or curiosity about actors, can count on Depp to invent his
own way
of delivering the goods. Yet the results have been mixed. Ed
Wood caught the naïf in Wood
but missed the roué, probably
because Burton couldn’t imagine how one man could be
both—a misapprehension I
can’t help thinking Johnny could have straight on. Even from
a director who’ll
never grow up, Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory struck me as a bit long in the tooth fairy; Depp is
famous for
modeling his performances on unlikely inspirations, but turning Willy
Wonka
into Michael Jackson—Depp’s own denials to the
contrary—was at once too
obvious, at least by his standards, and too unpleasant.
Yet
by then, of course, he
was already indelibly Captain Jack Sparrow to a generation of tots. The
real
joke is that after twenty years of chasing edginess, Depp’s
playing a pirate in
a Disney movie ended up being the most subversive act of his career,
with a
characterization that made a better case for following your bliss than Ed Wood ever did—just as
Depp’s
flake-out CIA agent in Once Upon a Time
in Mexico ended up saying more about drug-addled craziness
than Blow and Fear
and Loathing put together.
The
Pirates sequel may well thrill the
kiddies while disappointing me.
Even the original was clumsily repetitious, in that jerry-built,
overscaled
popcorn-movie way, and Depp’s outrageousness is now part of
the formula.
Franchises exist to deliver more of the same—just what
he’s spent his career
avoiding—and that’s why they’re better
left to Tom Cruise. Still, I’m looking
forward more to Dead Man’s Chest
than
I am to Depp’s next obeisance to his private gods of cool: The Rum Diary, another chip off Hunter S.
Thompson’s block. Even if
Pirates is set, no matter how
nominally, in a much more remote past, a brilliant cartoon like Captain
Jack
belongs to our shared present. That’s where the actors who
matter to us live,
giving posterity little glimpses of the way we were.
*
Johnny Depp’s Weird
Science
By
now everyone knows that
Johnny based Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates
of the Caribbean on Keith Richards, but who knew he also
incorporated
characteristics from a famously amorous cartoon skunk? Below are five
Depp
roles and the strange (sometimes brilliant) inspirations he might have
used to
bring them to life. Can you tell the real from the fake? (We just gave
you the
first one.)
Captain
Jack Sparrow =
Keith Richards + Pepe Le Pew
Ed
Wood = Ronald Reagan +
Casey Kasem
Ichabod
Crane = Angela
Lansbury + Roddy McDowall
Edward
Scissorhands = Theda
Bara + Frankenstein’s Monster
-- additional photos added by Zone editors