Johnny’s Depth
Sure, he’s still cool, but Johnny Depp is a new man, creating Oscar buzz with Finding Neverland and cherishing his family-though he still loves a whoopee cushion.
Johnny Depp was having his very own take-your-daughter-to-work day. For months he had been commuting from the set of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory near London to see his fami- ly-Lily-Rose, 5, Jack, 2, and their mom, his longtime companion, Vanessa Paradis, 31-at their retreat on the French Riviera. Every weekend was the same, says producer Richard Zanuck: On Friday after Work Depp took a two-hour flight to Nice followed by a two-hour drive to the family house in a tiny French village, then headed back to London again every Sunday night. The trip never Wore him out. “Monday morning he’d be all smiles and say; ‘I just had the greatest time with my family’ ” says Zanuck. “It seemed to refresh him.”
But he brought the family to England for the last month of shooting. And nothing could quite compare to the charge he got bringing Lily-Rose to the set on Nov. 9. Zanuck explains, “He Wanted her to see him playing with the Oompa Loompas.”
Talk about perks. Less than a year Hollywood’s sweetly scruffy outsider was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for the $654 million-grossing Pirates of the Caribbean, Depp, 41, is once again riding high on a Wave of good fortune. There’s Oscar buzz about his role as Peter Pan author J.M.Barrie in Finding Neverland. And there’s Depp’s deep contentment with family life – a life that now includes a recently purchased private island in the Caribbean where he can watch Paradis, an actress and model, play with their two children. “One of the most beautiful things in the world,” Depp told Oprah Winfrey on Nov. 2, “is seeing a mommy with her kids. There’s nothing more beautiful, nothing more sublime.” Though the ability to name your movie after years of being known as the coolest guy nobody goes to see (“Box office poison,” Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein said of his colleagues’ take on Depp before Pirates) is pretty darn good. Depp has signed on to make two Pirates sequels-but also The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the true story of a French editor who suffered a paralytic stroke and dictated a memoir by blinking his eye. Thesedays, he picks films based primarily on their appeal to his “kiddies” As he told Le Parisien writer Alain Grasset, a longtime friend of Paradis’s, he wants his children to “be proud,” says Grasset, “and say, ‘Dad did good work for a while.”’ Work like his heartwarming-and wrenching-turn in Neverland as the eccentric Barrie, who befriends the young sons of a widow (Kate Winslet) and finds inspiration for Peter Pan. “Johnny is at the pinnacle of his career,” says Weinstein, who was an executive producer on Neverland and has worked with Depp on Dead Man,
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I must say, I don’t think I would’ve ever met Johnny Depp w/out the help of my neighbor Matt. So Matt, if you read this, ever, you are the best!!! OK, now on to the good stuff. Here’s my story……
I work at the San Diego Zoo on my spare time on weekends. I’m an educator, and I basically educate the public. Anyways, I had come home from a long day at work. I was tired and just about ready to crash on the couch, when my neighbor, Matt, knocked on the door. Matt is a film maker, and he works for Sony Pictures. Well, he told me he was going to film the Golden Globe Awards, and had asked me if I wanted to go. OF COURSE I SAID YES!!! And then came the best part…he told me Johnny Depp was gonna be there!!!AAAHHHH!!!!! I was so excited. I have been a Johnny fan since I can remember. I used to watch “21 Jump Street” in my crib! And he told me that he guarenteed himself that I was gonna meet him!!! YAY!!!! Well after all of the excitement, I checked my calendar and realized I had 2 weeks to get a dress and be prepared. I needed to get started! A while later I had a dress and I was ready to make like a Tom and Cruise. lolz! Or in this case, maybe I’ll make it like a pirate and sail. Back to the point!! About 2 weeks later, the day had arrived……
It was January 25, at 4:30 in the afternoon in my town, San Diego, boarding a plane to fly to L.A. . Now see, San Diego is only about a 2 hr. drive to L.A., but we flew because it was free, on a private jet, and it was faster. We got there in about 15 mins. When I got off the jet, we went straight to the Four Seasons Hotel to change into our free hotel room. My dress was a black halter w/a glittery white strip down the middle and on the sides. So for about an hour and a half I sat in a salon chair waiting in anticipation for Matt to come and tell me that he’s ready to leave! FINALLY, THE TIME HAD COME!!!! I WAS GOING TO MEET JOHNNY DEPP!!!
I got in the limo and the driver took off. I was so nervous about what I was going to say to him. Thoughts and questions kept going through my mind the drive there. Without realizing it, the driver had stopped, and told me that this was it. And it was it, I was at the Golden Globes. I got out of the car and saw tons of fans and celebrities, and the only one I concentrated on finding was Johnny, so I was on my search. I went inside the building and saw a bunch of tables w/name tags. So I was reading them: Jack Nicholsen……Matt LeBlanc….Nicole Kidman…….Jennifer Lopez…..Johnny Depp……JOHNNY DEPP?!
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Ivy is one lucky girl who managed to meet Johnny thanks to the Make-a-Wish foundation. This is probably the most amazing experience you have ever read of a fan getting to meet an actor and to spend the whole day with him, and for this reason you should take your time and read in thoroughly.
“I am 15 years old and have a disease called Cystic Fibrosis. Although this disease is considered potentially fatal, I am VERY healthy. I’m sure that as far as this disease is concerned, I’ll live a very long and happy life. I am pretty open about it, so if you have any questions about it, feel free to ask, or you can visit www.cff.org
The disease mostly affects the lungs and stomach, but puts a heavy strain on all of the organs. Of course for every patient it varies a little. As I said, I am very healthy, as I ran on our cross country team, beginning track, and even play the flute. I take pills whenever I eat, and do a daily treatment. Beside a few other pills including vitamins and whatnot, that is about it.
Throught the Make-A-Wish Foundation (www.wish.org) I was offered a wish. My first idea of a wish was to go on a Disney cruise. It had never crossed my mind to meet Johnny! lol : ) The cruise didn’t quite pan out, and so one day I was without a wish idea sitting on the computer at the johnnydeppzone, and my mom comes over to me and says I should consider meeting Johnny.
I thought about it, and remembered how my CF doctor had told me that sometimes meeting celebrities didn’t work out the best, so I wondered what the right desicion should be. I worried he wouldn’t be how I imagined, and didn’t want to waste a wish that could be great. I waited a while and thought about it pretty hard. This might sound pretty corny, but this is what confirmed it for me.
(I’m not even sure if I’ve told anybody this before! I forgot about it until now! lol) One day I was cleaning my room, and happened to be thinking about my wish, and whether or not I should choose to meet Johnny or not. There I was thinking about him, and I find this rubber eyeball on my floor. I had Never seen it before…so it was Very odd. It was one of those 25cent machine eyeballs that squish a little bit, but looked real. I picked it up, puzzled, looked at it, and then I’m like, “woah!”. I immediately thought of Pirates of the Caribbean and the poor pirate without an eye. For me, that was my sign of meeting Johnny! lol : ) I remember now how excited I was.
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On Tuesday (today) Johnny was on the Oprah Winfrey Show, together with Kate Winslet and Freddie Highmore. He looked again 10 years younger than at the London Premiere.
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HOST: Oprah Winfrey
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Ellen Rakieten
JOHNNY DEPP AND KATE WINSLET
Unidentified Man #1: All right. Here we go, guys.
Unidentified Man #2: Oprah’s on the way.
Unidentified Man #3: Good show, good show, good show.
OPRAH WINFREY: Johnny Depp’s OPRAH show debut, the sexiest man alive. When you look at the cover…
Mr. JOHNNY DEPP (Actor): I tried not to look at the cover.
WINFREY: A rare interview.
Most romantic encounter…
Mr. DEPP: Wow.
WINFREY: …that you can speak of.
Mr. DEPP: Yeah. Better have a drink.
WINFREY: From ’80s teen heartthrob to A-list movie star…
Mr. DEPP: I was convinced that I was going to be fired.
WINFREY: …and the love of his wife.
Mr. DEPP: I just knew.
WINFREY: Plus…
Ms. KATE WINSLET (Actress): Oh, this is my kind of talk show.
WINFREY: …the ultra-talented Kate Winslet.
A lot of people make a big deal about your weight. You look spectacular.
Next.
Yes. Good to see you. Good to see you. Great. Good to see you. Whoo! Thank you. Thank you. Too much. Thank you. So I hope you go out and vote today, because I just did. I just did. Everybody has to vote today. Now,
OK, I know my next guest is not going to like this. He’s not going to like
it. But whether he likes it or not, I’m going to hold it up. There you go:
Sexiest Man Alive. I’m going to hold it up. Sexiest Man Alive. I don’t
know, what would that feel like? I don’t know.Now I haven’t seen him. I have not seen him at all. I have not seen him,
because I don’t meet the gu–if I’ve never met a guest, and I like to meet
them when you meet them so I can have the same drool factor that you do. But my producers have met him. And they just came in and went, `Oh, my God!’ And I said, `Really, what is it?’ and she went, `Oh, my God!’ So, OK, I can’t
wait. Did you just see the movie, though, right? Isn’t it wonderful? It’s
really wonderful. OK. And let me ask you this. Who cried? Did you cry?
Oh, you all cried! You cried. I was–you know what? I said they are not
going to get me. I tried so hard not to cry! And only till the last–I
didn’t cry for the (mumbles), I didn’t cry when the (mumbles), even when the (mumbles). But then the last scene, I was like gone.
OK. Johnny Depp’s new movie, “Finding Neverland”–it’ll get you. It’ll get you. His performance is just superb, is it not? It really is superb. It’s
no wonder why he’s called one of the most gifted actors of his generation. Let’s take a look.
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Title: Johnny’s Depth
Publication: People Magazine
Issue: November 2004
Johnny Depp was having his very own take-your-daughter-to-work day. For months he had been commuting from the set of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory near London to see his family—Lily-Rose, 5, Jack, 2, and their mom, his longtime companion, Vanessa Paradis, 31—at their retreat on the French Riviera. Every weekend was the same, says producer Richard Zanuck: On Friday after work Depp took a two-hour flight to Nice followed by a two-hour drive to the family house in a tiny French village, then headed back to London again every Sunday night. The trip never wore him out. “Monday morning he’d be all smiles and say, ‘I just had the greatest time with my family’” says Zanuck. “It seemed to refresh him.” But he brought the family to England for the last month of shooting. And nothing could quite compare to the charge he got bringing Lily-Rose to the set on Nov. 9. As Zanuck explains, “He wanted her to see him playing with the Oompa Loompas.”
Talk about perks. Less than a year after Hollywood’s sweetly scruffy outsider was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for the $654 million-grossing Pirates of the Caribbean, Depp, 41, is once again riding high on a wave of good fortune. There’s Oscar buzz about his role as Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland. And there’s Depp’s deep contentment with family life— a life that now includes a recently purchased private island in the Caribbean where he can watch Paradis, an actress and model, play with their two children. “One of the most beautiful things in the world,” Depp told Oprah Winfrey on Nov. 2, “is seeing a mommy with her kids. There’s nothing more beautiful, nothing more sublime.” Though the ability to name your movie after years of being known as the coolest guy nobody goes to see (“Box office poison,” Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein said of his colleagues’ take on Depp before Pirates) is pretty darn good. Depp has signed on to make two Pirates sequels—but also The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the true story of a French editor who suffered a paralytic stroke and dictated a memoir by blinking his eye. These days, he picks films based primarily on their appeal to his “kiddies.” As he told Le Parisien writer Alain Grasset, a longtime friend of Paradis’s, he wants his children to “be proud,” says Grasset, “and say, ‘Dad did good work for a while.’” Work like his heartwarming—and wrenching—turn in Neverland as the eccentric Barrie, who befriends the young sons of a widow (Kate Winslet) and finds inspiration for Peter Pan. “Johnny is at the pinnacle of his career,” says Weinstein, who was an executive producer on Neverland and has worked with Depp on Dead Man, Chocolat and Once Upon a Time in Mexico. “He is the most versatile actor in the industry. He is a leading man,
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Title: Heeere’s Johnny
Publication: Film Review
Issue: November 2004
It feels strange to call Johnny Depp a sex symbol. He may have starred as a man who thought he was the greatest lover m the world in Don Juan DaMarco but Depp is not known for playing the matinee idol. While the late 1980s TV show 21 Jump Street propelled him to pin-up status, Depp has been running away from the label ever since. From his cross dressing filmmaker in Ed Wood to his pill-popping journalist in Fear and Loathing In Los Vagas, Depp has chosen roles that do anything but elicit swoons from his female fans. Consider his gap-toothed swashbuckler in Pirates of the Caribbean – which last year brought him the biggest hit of his career, taking a whopping $305 million – and you will see what I mean.
Not that it`s stopped him regularly being voted one of Hollywood’s sexiest movie stars of all time. Maybe it`s that down-at-heel appearance of his, but Johnny Depp doesn’t have to play hunks to come across as sexy. His teen-idol status was all in his off-screen behavior; from dating a string of high profile starlets, from Winona Ryder to Sherilyn Fenn to trashing hotel rooms, fighting with paparazzi and owning the infamous Viper Room club. Depp isrock’n’roll to the hilt – so much so, he even played slide-guitar on the Oasis track Fade In-Out.
These days, however, he is a settled family man. Currently living with French singer-actress Vanessa Paradis, with whom he has two children – five year-old Lily Rose and two year old Jack – the 41 year old Depp’s roles now reflect this. Take his latest film, Marc Forster’s Finding Neverland. He plays Scottish playwright JM Barrie, the man who penned the magical play Peter Pan after he befriended the inspirational Llewelyn Dawes family (headed in the film. by Kate Winslet). “Being a Dad helped immensely to prepare.“ Depp admits. It helps you to understand that energy that children have – Barrie never let it go. He always believed. I think it`s important for us as adults to have that still, but it gets lost over the years – doesn’t it
No doubt, there’s something childlike in Depp’s performances – but would he take to be the boy that never grows up? “Of course, the notion is beautiful.” he replies. ‘The idea of staying a boy, or a child, forever But I think you can have known plenty of people who in their later years – were like little kids, and had the energy, curiosity and fascination of children. I think we can keep that. I think it`s important we keep that – that’s part of staying young.”
While Depp has had problems with accents before – notably his less-than-perfect ye ole London accent for From Hell – he totally nails Barrie’s North-of-the-Border brogue. “The Scottish for me was a great challenge,
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Title: The Innocents
Author: Kevin Jackson
Publication: Sight and Sounds
Issue: November 2004
Marc Forster’s unpredictable follow up to his critical success with Monster’s Ball (2001) is a biopic, of sorts, which purports to tell the story of how J.M. Barrie found his inspiration for Peter Pan in his dealings with the Llewelyn Davies family – the originals for the Darlings in the play. Adapted by David Magee from a recent stage piece, The Man Who Was Peter Pan by Allen Knee. Finding Neverland is an unusually sober, tactful, thoughtful and thought prompting example of the genre; a rare example of a film aimed at the so-called family audience which will appeal most directly to the mature members of the family rather than the screaming tykes.
Like many other highly literate biopics -Lawrence of Arabia, for instance – it is also a pack of whoppers. Well established facts of chronology and geography are distorted, characters traduced or simply invented, unwarranted speculations passed off as gospel truth. Does this matter? Not greatly, and while some pedantic Barrie fans will no doubt wax apoplectic, their ire will be misplaced. Some of the movie’s trifling’s with reality act mainly to stream line the plot and jerk a few additional tears: standard dramatic license. The most important of them strengthen its ruling theme, which, to put it maybe a shade too pompously, is that of the origins and consolations of art: standard poetic license. Put briefly, Finding Neverland jettisons pedestrian accuracy in the service of mythical truth.
Its principal events – quit reading at this point if you’re the sort of spectator who hates to know that Act Five of Hamlet features lots of blood on the walls – run something like this. Finding Neverland begins in the mode of Topsy Turvy with a lavish first night not that of Peter Pan, but of another of Barrie’s many productions. Little Mary. Mildly against the conventions of showbiz pictures, this first night is a humiliating flop, and one which brings its author ‘Johnny Depp giving a beautifully restrained and subtle performance) up against the gloomy realities of his middle age: waning inspiration and a loveless, childless, sexless marriage. A cleverly contrived symmetrical master shot wordlessly expresses the gap between man and wife: Mary Barrie (Radha Mitchell), to the left of the screen, opens her bedroom door to a dark Edwardian interior; Barrie, to the right, opens his to the warm glow and dazzle of Neverland. He has deserted Mary, not for another woman, but for his inner paradise.
On one of his habitual trips to the nearby rus in urbe of Kensington Gardens, where he tries in vain to dream up new scenarios, Barrie encounters a pack of well-scrubbed little boys – Peter, Jack, George and Michael – and their beautiful widowed mother Sylvia Llewelyn Davies (Kate Winslet). It is not quite clear what need they meet in his sad soul,
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