Once Marlon Brando told him, ‘We only have so many faces in our pockets.’ It’s career advice Depp has never forgotten – By Gayle MacDonald for the Globe and Mail.
Johnny Depp relishes full-blown transformation.
He got a kick out of inserting gold teeth and kohling his eyes to play the inimitable campy pirate Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. He enjoyed putting his own face-powdered stamp on Willy Wonka with Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And now he’s hitting the screens as a clumsy, insecure and well-meaning puppet named Victor, in Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.
Depp, in Toronto last weekend to promote his friend Burton’s stop-motion animated film, says these roles have been a nice change from character-driven parts that perhaps are a bit closer to the real Johnny Depp. “Any actor with any semblance of sanity — probably our biggest fear is to go anywhere near who you are. It’s okay to use certain truths,” he continues, but then is interrupted by a tray of falling plates just outside a room at the Four Seasons Hotel.
“You saw I didn’t do anything at all. I’ll be blamed for that.”
Then Depp, who has always had a loyal cult of fans but only recently enjoyed blockbuster, box-office success, says he’s never forgotten the words of a wise man he worked with on 1995’s Don Juan DeMarco. “I can hear Marlon’s [Brando] words reverberating. One time he said to me, ‘How many films do you do a year?’ ” Depp recalls.
“And I said, ‘I don’t know. Two or three.’ And he said, ‘You gotta watch yourself.’ I said, ‘Why’s that?’ And he said, ‘We only have so many faces in our pockets.’ And as you get to a certain point, and you’ve played different characters, you think, God, he really was right.”
