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Johnny Deeper

Michael Jackson was interested in the part. So was Tom Cruise. But the title role in Edward Scissorhands went to former teen-idol Johnny Depp. Described by one movie director as  “he best looking gas-station attendant who ever lived”, Depp looks set to finally shed his pretty boy image an emerge as a serious actor. Bill Zehme met him in LA….

Johnny Depp is his real name. As a boy he was ridiculed for it. In the schoolyard he was called Dipp. Or Deppity Dawg. Later he was called Johnny Deeper, this being based upon a popular adolescent joke he barely remembers:

“Something about some guy having sex with some girl who kept saying, ‘Johnny, deeper!’”

The day we meet he extends his hand to shake mine, except that his hand is more like a piece of weaponry. In place of fingers there are blades. We are on a Twentieth Century Fox sound stage where he is making Edward Scissorhands, his second major film, in which he portrays the man-made boy with scissors for fingers. He laughs quietly at his own comic gesture.

Later we meet one morning in a coffee shop, where Winona Ryder, his movie-star fiancee, has left him before driving off to do some errands.

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The other half of Hollywood’s hippest couple, Johnny Depp is better known here as Winona Ryder’s boyfriend. Now with Edward Scissorhands, their first film together, he also shows he can act: but its not a pretty sight…

“My lips are so fucked.” Johnny Depp groans and reaches for some vitamin E cream. He’s right. His pretty-boy pout is in trouble. Dry and cracked, burnt red raw in places. The result of another day’s work in the boiling hot 100-degree entre of nowheresville, Arizona. Depp’s here to shoot The Arrowtooth Waltz, a magically off-beat coming-of-age comedy which also stars Jerry Lewis and Faye Dunaway, and the first American film by Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica of Time Of The Gypsies fame. The last outpost of civilsation – a one-laundromat, two-street town called Patagonia – is an hour’s drive away. Along with his blasted lips, it’s another indication of just how far Johnny Depp will got leave behind the heart-throb image given to him by the US TV cop show 21 Jump Street.

In last year’s Cry Baby, he let John Waters have his wicked way with him. In Tim Burton’s upcomingEdward Scissorhands, he wears a Robert Smith wig and hides his face behind white paint and scars. Yesterday, he was stuck in the hottest spot in a very hot place, on top of a ranchhouse in the middle of a sun-smoked stretch of prairie,

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Johnny Depp – tough guy or cry baby?

baby face

 Johnny Depp is 26 but looks 18. The cop show 21Jump Street has made him America’s most  famous TV teen idol – so famous in fact that cult director John Waters paid him a million dollars for his first starring movie role, in Cry Baby, out this summer. Rock star good looks aside, Depp also boasts an intriguing bad boy past – perfect credentials for another ready-made movie hero. Tony Fletcher meets him in Baltimore. 

At the top of Johnny Depp’s lean and muscular right arm, above the fading tattoo of an Indian chief’s headdress, are two words that were etched into the actor’s skin for all eternity only months ago. They read “Winona Forever”, a public and permanent declaration of the 26- year-old’s love for his pregnant fiancee, actress Winona Ryder.

But if Depp hopes that the tattoo will persuade his legion of young female followers to search elsewhere for a hero, he is mistaken. The previous evening, at the premiere in Baltimore of the new John Waters movie Cry Baby, a high-camp musical comedy in which Depp has the title role,

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“I hope this isn’t going to be about that teen-idol bullshit. We’re really sick of that shit.”~ Jeff Ballard, press agent for Johnny Depp

Bobby Sherman. David Cassidy. Davy Jones. Shaun Cassidy. Each name is a step in the funeral march of burned-out television heartthrobs. Johnny Depp, 25, currently holds the pole position in budding fantasies all over North America, thanks to his lead role on the Fox Broadcasting Company’s baby-cop show 21 Jump Street. As Tom Hanson, a cop who goes undercover in high schools to break up drug gangs and pornography rings, Depp is a sexy guidance counselor, the older guy in every neighborhood who takes you around and shows you the ropes but keeps you out of real trouble. And he has everything that makes little girls wriggle: a forest of eyelashes, sensitive eyes, spiked locks stiffened with several hair-care products of the Eighties, dangly earrings.

But Depp doesn’t want to be a teen idol. “I don’t want to make a career of taking my shirt off,” he says. “I’d like to shave off all my hair, even my eyebrows, try it that way. I don’t fault the TV stars who do teen magazines. They took a hold of their situations, took offers that gave them the big money fast, but they were dead in two years. I don’t want that.” The ironic thing is that Depp didn’t have to do TV. Four years ago, with no acting experience or training,

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Two teenagers are standing in front of the Daley Plaza government building in Chicago, whimpering and waiting. On this murky, muggy Saturday morning, Trish and Rhonda – all of 15 years old – clutch ripped, jagged-edged magazine pages in vice grips. “But do you really think we’ll get close enough to touch him?” Trish whispers, knowing full well that the odds are hovering around slim-to-none. Rhonda is shaking her head in mock angst. “Maybe we’ll get an autograph,” she laments, “but face it. We’ll never get to touch Johnny Depp.”

It’s 10:30 a.m. “Who do you want?” shouts local Fox-TV anchor Robin Brantley to some 7,000 high school and college females who have gathered in an otherwise deserted part of down-town Chicago.

“Johnny!”
“Johnny!”
“Johnny!”
“Johnny!”
They chant in unison. Welcome to the Windy City’s yearly “Be Good. Go to School. Say No to Drugs!” youth pep festival which today seems like some weird religious event. “Johnny who?” taunts Brantley, buying some time while the cast of Fox’s 21 Jump Street – Depp, Holly Robinson, Dustin Nguyen, Peter DeLuise and Steven Williams – waltz out of the Daley Center high rise and onto a makeshift stage flanked by police and two-ton security guards.

“Hello, I’m Johnny Depp,” he says, approaching the mike to a roar of applause. “My basic message is simple: Protect your mind. Protect your heart. And take care of yourself.” He runs a hand through longish ink-black hair and smiles.

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He’s Cool! He’s Cute! He’s Available! The sexy star of 21 Jump Street gets personal in an exclusive SPLICE interview

Ask any member of the cast or crew of 21 Jump Street and they’ll tell you: The only word to describe Johnny Depp is “cool.” It seems, in fact, that he is the coolest creature to hit the small screen since “the Fonz ” strutted his stuff on Happy Days. Johnny Depp is the King of Cool, the valedictorian of the Cool School, and everybody knows it. Everybody, that is, except Johnny Depp.

The handsome 25-year-old actor – who’s blessed with high chiseled cheekbones, courtesy of his Cherokee heritage – is so unimpressed with his own celebrity status that he denies he is the star of 21 Jump Street. He says his character is the “strong center” of the show. On a recent trip to New York City, Johnny was surprised when he was asked to sit backstage in the Green Room to watch a taping of Late Night with David Letterman, because David doesn’t allow celebrities in the TV audience. And what celebrity worth his weight in dark shades would actually convince his mother and stepfather to move to Vancouver, Canada, so they could be closer to him?

Johnny was born in Owensboro, KY on June 9, 1963. The youngest of four children, he and his family moved to Miramar,

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Once a troublemaker, Johnny Depp of 21 Jump Street is now admired for his cool and his part in a series about teen problems.

On a lonely, rainy, anonymous street, Johnny Depp, running through a scene from Fox’s 21 Jump Street, roars up in his blue Mustang, screeches to a halt, leaps out and starts talking tough. His Jump Street character, Tom Hanson, is a rookie cop who’s gone undercover to infiltrate circles of teen-age criminals, but Depp’s stance as a hoodlum would fool anyone. With his angelic punk face and his hair cascading James Dean-style into his eyes, he looks the perfect teen-age rebel.

It comes from years of real-life experience. Depp, 24, grew up in Miramar, Fla., where he wasn’t exactly on the road to becoming a National Merit scholar. “I hung around with bad crowds,” he admits. “We used to break and enter places. We’d break into the school and destroy a room or something. I used to steal things from stores.” And, like some of the kids Officer Tom Hanson has busted on 21 Jump Street, Depp was into drugs. “Pretty much any drug you can name,” he says, “I’ve done it.” At 13 he lost his virginity, and at 16 he dropped out of high school.

Fast-forward eight years to Vancouver, where Jump Street is shot. Depp has acquired a taste for $80-a-shot cognac and is a fan-magazine star, routinely mobbed by adoring teen-age girls.

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Johnny Depp

In 1987, Johnny Depp was already a teen idol through his starring role on the television series 21 Jump Street. He was living in a modest one-bedroom apartment in an art-deco building on Whitley Avenue in Hollywood. I would run into him several times late at night when he’d be hanging out with Nicolas Cage and other friends at Canter’s, a popular after-club eatery.I recently photographed Johnny again. His hair had grown but his angelic face remained much the same. Stardom had not inherently changed him; he was still soft-spoken and sweet. I did notice, though, a newfound inner strength and self-assurance.Johnny wanted to go beyond doing traditional leading-man roles and he has.

I grew up in many different houses. One in Miramar, Florida, sticks out in particular. We lived at 68th Avenue and Court, on the corner of a busy street. The house was a three-bedroom built in the sixties. It constantly smelled of my mom’s cooking: soup, beans and ham. I remember my brother and sister fighting. I had a poodle named Pepi. I shared a bedroom with my brother, who is 10 years older than me. He listened to a lot of Van Morrison and Bob Dylan.

We moved constantly. My mom just liked to move for some reason. By the time I was 15, we had lived in about 20 houses. It was hard. Depending on how far we’d move,

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