It’s tempting, as some have done, to call Johnny Depp the king of the weirdo actors writes Michael Sragow, the Sun Movie Critic for the Baltimore Sun.com. He adds that anyone surprised at Depp’s outre buccaneer Jack Sparrow in his Pirates of the Caribbean movies needs to know it’s just Johnny Depp doing what he does best: trying to make an old character “interesting and different, and push him as far as you can go.
…Depp famously drew on Keith Richards for Sparrow — and Richards will play Sparrow’s dad in the third Pirates movie. In the current Rolling Stone, Depp also credits his wide reading in pirate lore for some of Sparrow, such as a study called Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition (“I wasn’t exactly going for that with the character. … It was more that I liked the idea of being ambiguous”) and a book by a French sailor who said that he’d keep going as a sailor “because the horizon is always there.” In fact, he mined that idea for the first film’s last line, “Now, bring on that horizon.”
Visit the Baltimore Sun website to read more about the stories behind Johnny’s characters.
