In
his new
film, the probable Oscar contender adaptation
of
Stephen
Sondheim’s award-winning Broadway musical Sweeney
Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Johnny Depp plays the
titular
haircutter, throat slitter and serial killer. Directed by regular
collaborator
and best friend, the Hollywood Goth Tim Burton, it’s an intensely
atmospheric
and stomach-churningly gruesome horror movie that recreates Victorian
London in
black, white and plenty of scarlet. But beyond that, Sweeney
Todd is also a tragic romance and a passionate tale of
revenge.
“It’s the story of a man who becomes obsessed with avenging the horror of what happened to him,” says Depp, who’s in the big smoke on promotional duties, today dressed down in jeans and checked shirt, and evidently in a playful mood. “The idea of revenge is something most people don’t want to admit to. But I think we all have it, secretly somewhere in there. I’m a big fan of revenge. But I can’t give you an example,” the enviably good-looking 44-year-old says with a poker-face, “because I don’t want to implicate myself.”
Depp
has defined his idiosyncratic acting
career by playing an assortment of oddballs and bad boys, from John
Water’s Cry Baby and Burton’s Edward Scissorhands to his stoned
buccaneer in Pirates of the Caribbean
(for which priceless comic turn he was nominated for an Oscar) and now
the
tormented mass-murderer of old London town. And
having bucked the system Depp
has, against the odds, became star and a sex symbol. His has been an
uncommon
success story.
“I suppose it’s just luck of the draw, really,” Depp says with a shrug. “I feel very lucky to have had the opportunity to play all these different characters, whether they’re androgynous like [transvestite] Ed Wood, or incredibly macho like Captain Jack Sparrow. Sweeney’s a dark figure, but a hyper-sensitive one who has experienced something very traumatic in his life. I always saw him as a victim. I do believe that you have to bring some degree of truth from yourself to a role . . .”
Depp won’t get specific on this matter. When asked what part of himself he brought to the razor-wielding gullet slasher, he becomes evasive with a quip: “Okay, I’ll admit it here: I have shaved a grown man before. But he did survive, and he’s walking around to this day.”
Just
as this
joker’s career has taken an unconventional course,
so
too has Depp’s personal life. Born in a Kentucky backwater, Depp left
school
at age 15 (the year his parents divorced) to become a rock musician. He
played
guitar with a band named The Kids (once supporting Iggy Pop), got into
the kind
of trouble at which juvenile delinquents excel, married at 20, divorced
two
years later, and took a shot at acting (after being encouraged by
fellow wild
child Nicolas Cage), making his film debut in 1984’s A
Nightmare on Elm Street. Depp avoided the all-too-common fate
in
Hollywood of becoming typecast—as a pretty boy, obviously—by making Edward Scissorhands. He credits Burton
with rescuing him from the Hollywood meat factory, which the Goth and
his dark
fairytale did by paving the way for all the offbeat films Depp
subsequently
made.
Then, in 1999, just as he was becoming an established star, Depp quit America to make his home in France with the French singer-actress Vanessa Paradis. They met in Paris while he was making Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate, and soon after conceived a daughter, Lily-Rose. Depp credits his girls with transforming him from a bad boy to a family man. Nowadays, he and his family (expanded to a foursome with the arrival of son Jack five years ago) live an idyllic rural life in a villa in the south of France. “My kids and Vanessa have given me . . . a sense of home that I never had in my life,” Depp has said. So, while playing a pirate may have made Depp a bonafide movie star (albeit one who assiduously avoids courting fame), family always comes before career.
That
last was exemplified last year while
Depp was filming Sweeney Todd in
London. Lily-Rose contracted suffered a serious health scare
(reportedly the e
coli virus) and Depp stopped work, filming was put on hold and the star
suggested to Burton he should perhaps recast his lead. Happily, Depp’s
daughter
recovered—“It was a very bumpy patch,” the father told the press, “but
she has
come through it beautifully and unscathed, and she is now as healthy as
she
always was”—and Sweeney Todd was
completed.
The question is, now that he’s become a movie star with the clout to pick and choose roles, and bearing in mind that the potentially softening effect of being a fortysomething family man, will Depp continue to inhabit the oddballs niche he created for himself? Well, he’s certainly not in the business of repeating himself. On the subject of musicals, he says, “I did do a musical many years ago with John Waters, a thing called Cry-Baby. But technically it was only really half of me—it wasn’t me singing. Tim’s the only person brave enough to let me try to sing. I’d never even sung in the shower; I was too mortified. But once I got over the initial fear it was kind of enjoyable. Sondheim’s melodies and lyrics are a real pleasure. It’s really beautiful stuff. So I enjoyed it. Would I ever do it again?” Depp says with a laugh. “No.”
What Depp is doing next is playing the notorious American gangster John Dillinger in Michael “Miami Vice” Mann’s Public Enemies. So, it’s back to the bad boy, then.