Title: Johnny Depp
Publication: : Movie Idols
Issue: January 2001
JOHNNY DEPP is an interesting man. As an actor he has that rare chameleonic quality that allows him to inhabit a role and convince you that what you see on screen isn’t a performance but a possession. Yet if you see or hear him being interviewed he can seem inarticulate, hesitant, something of a cipher. So you may conclude that he is one of those performers who, lacking a clearly defined character of their own is able to put on new characters like a suit of clothes. Then again, if you were to read any of the articles he has written about his influences and heroes, or pick out key quotes from printed interviews, he seems to be a deep thinker, a true eccentric, a strong and unique individual.
He is, in short, not an easy man to profile, a figure of apparent contradictions and paradoxes. Only one thing is certain – he is probably the finest actor of his generation. You can be assured that whatever film he is in it will be worth watching for him alone. Also, the fact that he has chosen to make it indicates that it has something in the script or the vision that will make it outstanding on one level or another. He doesn’t make popcorn trash, he is a genuine artist and his choices command respect.
John Christopher Depp III was born on the June 9, 1963 in Owensboro, Kentucky. Yes, he’s nearly 40 years old, though you’d never guess it from looking at him. His mother was a waitress, his father an engineer, and Johnny was one of three children. His childhood was one of constant change. “By the time I was 15,” he revealed, “we had lived in about 20 houses.”
They moved house almost at the drop of a hat, although they stayed roughly in the same area, so he didn’t have to change schools too often. There’s a sense from interviews that this lack of stability and predictability in his life left him restless, rootless and looking for some sort of certainty to hold onto. “To this day, I hate it when I have to move from location to location.”
He was a difficult and mischievous kid. “I hung around with bad crowds,” he said. “We used to break and enter places. We’d break into the school and destroy a room or something. 1 used to steal things from stores.”
He liked tape-recording people when they didn’t know. He dug a huge tunnel in his front yard, trying to reach his bedroom and “pretty much any drug you can name, I’ve done it,” he claimed. He lost his virginity at 13 and dropped out of school at 16, the same year his parents divorced.
At this time, his best friend Sal found himself homeless and living in a car, a ’67 Impala. Johnny joined him, and they filled the car with empty beer cans and lived off sandwiches. It wasn’t the most auspicious of starts in life – high school dropout from a broken home living in a car at 16, playing around with drugs and petty crime. For many people this would have been the beginning of a long, slow decline.
“When I was a kid, I did drugs when I freaked out… They were hurting me physically and mentally. Drugs were dragging me down. They were killing me. I quit.”
Simple as that. No rehab, no trauma. He just decided to stop and did so. This strength of spirit, refusing to give in and go down the self-destructive path that seemed so set, would stand him in good stead. “Everybody puts a label on it and calls me a bad boy or a delinquent or a rebel or one of those horrible terms, but to me, it was much more curiosity. It wasn’t like I was some malicious kid who wanted to kick an old lady in the shin and run, you know? I just wanted to find out what was out there.”
But Depp eventually found one certainty that kept him focused – music. When he was only 12 years old, he bought himself an electric guitar for $25, and from that moment on he devoted a lot of his time to practicing and playing. He skipped classes, actually with the help of his music teacher who allowed him to use a rehearsal room, and when he went home in the evening he would lock himself in his room and practice.
But even though he was devoted to music he couldn’t quite quit the habit of changing and moving that his parents had instilled in him. In just a few years he notched up a grand total of 15 different bands. Finally, he ended up playing lead guitar in The Kids, and he thought this could be his ticket to stardom. The band moved from Florida to LA in 1983 and started playing the club scene, looking for the big break. Depp is phlegmatic about their lack of success. “We didn’t make it, although we loved music. And 1 still do. I guess it happens.”
It was at about this time that he got married, to Lori Anne Allison, but the marriage only lasted two years and in 1985 they were divorced. Johnny and Lori remained on good terms and she soon started seeing Nicolas Cage, who made friends with Depp and suggested that he try his hand at acting. Realizing that his musical career had stalled – he was stuck telemarketing ballpoint pens – Depp decided he’d give it a try.
“Nick set up a meeting for me with his agent and she sent me to read for a movie,” he said. “They gave me a script to study. Two days later, I read for it and they gave me the role. That was Nightmare on Elm Street.”
During the two days between getting the script and giving the audition Depp had an actor friend stay at his home and help him prepare and learn his lines. Once he got the part he never looked back.
Depp had no experience or training as an actor. He’d never even been in a school play. His entire experience of performance was as part of a band, a collective, four people playing together as one. Now he had no one to rely on – he had to learn his lines, hit a mark, give a performance all on his own. It was a huge leap in the dark with huge potential for failure. And he knew it.
“Doing Nightmare On Elm Street was a trial by fire. The fact that it was totally new to me was a tremendous challenge. I found it was just me. It all depended on me and my own choices.”
Happily, his choices were sound. Wes Craven, the director of Nightmare, recalls why he cast an unknown quantity. “He just had a very powerful and yet subtle personality, there was some sort of charisma about him. He really had sort of a James Dean attraction.”
The fact that Craven’s teenage daughter, on set at the time, “flipped out” for Depp, may also have had some bearing on things!
Nightmare on Elm Street was a huge hit and Depp decided to stick with acting and see where it led him. Unfortunately it led him nowhere fast. A couple of TV guest spots kept him afloat for a year but his next movie project was a dire teen sex comedy called Private Resort. It bombed, and for a while he seemed to be suffering as a result of his lack of training and experience. His Private Resort co-star. Northern Exposure’s Rob Morrow, said that Johnny “had no idea what he was doing, yet he had an understanding of how people operate. He had obstacles, but he was aware of them.”
Next came a small part in another smash hit. Platoon, which gave his profile a much-needed boost. Part of the problem was that Depp didn’t want to do TV. “Television is a little frustrating for me,” says Depp. “There’s no time for preparation. In features, you have loads of time to do the work. And the work is the most important thing of all.”
Immediately upon returning from three-and-a-haJf months filming Platoon in the Philippines he got his big break, in TV.
21 Jump Street was a show about a group of young cops who help sort out troubled kids and teach them the error of their ways. Depp was approached but refused to even look at the script. “It wasn’t that I was snubbing television or anything, but I wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment,” he said.
Another actor was given the role and Depp continued pursuing movie roles. Three weeks later the other actor left the show and Depp was approached again. This time he agreed to read the script. He liked it and was on the set by the end of the week. “People weren’t banging my door down with scripts, and the pilot was very good, had a lot of strong possibilities. Plus, the average life of a TV series is not a long one, you know? So I decided to do it.”
He didn’t, however, consider it a big deal. “I thought it would go for one season, tops.” A bit of experience, a bit of exposure, another rung on the ladder and then back to movies, that was the plan. Unfortunately, the show was a runaway success and eventually ran for five seasons, making Depp a teen idol and a small-screen superstar.
He had to adjust to being greeted everywhere by crowds of screaming teenage girls. “After we’d shot the first season, it got a little strange. I don’t hate it; I don’t mind it; it’s not an ugly thing, but it’s a little strange.”
His love life then came under scrutiny, which did make him more than a little uncomfortable. For the record, he was engaged to Twin Peaks star Sherilyn Fenn for three years, and then to Dirty Dancing’s Jennifer Grey before Winona Ryder came on the scene and thrust Depp into the tabloid big league.
Back on Jump Street, Depp earned $45,000 an episode but when the show’s creator left at the end of the second season Depp came to question the morality of the show and the fact that scripts were often watered down to keep advertisers happy.
By the middle of the third season, he became so outraged by some of the scripts that in one instance he simply refused to appear in an episode. This forced the programme-makers to create a new supporting character specifically designed to do the things Depp didn’t want to do. Depp wanted to leave, but he was their star so he was held to his contract. There was a lot of on-set strife, rumours flew, things got bitter and angry and eventually, at the end of the fourth year, Depp was able to leave the show.
A lot of Depp’s subsequent movie choices are clearly dictated by the lessons he learnt at this time. His desire for offbeat, independent, uncompromising, quirky roles in films helmed by auteurs and visionaries comes from learning early on how easily art can be compromised, sullied and sold out in the commerce-driven Hollywood hills. During his time on 21 Jump Street Depp had been able to make a couple of movies in order to begin building the reputation that he hoped would support him when he inevitably left the show. That the films he made were Cry-Baby, for iconoclastic camera loony John Waters, and Edward Scissorhands for gothic genius Tim Burton, both give some idea of the risks he was willing to take. That’s not all; they show how much he wanted to balance the production-line working in TV with exciting and challenging big-screen work. It’s also a testament to Depp’s talent that such intriguing creators were anxious to work with someone who was, after all, just the star of a flashy kids TV show.
Having been so entirely trapped by commercial considerations for so long, so early in his career, Johnny Depp vowed never to fall into that trap again. He was going to forge his own path.
Four Johnny Depp films you’ve probably never seen but really should!
ARIZONA DREAM
The most eccentric and impenetrable of Depp’s early films, it’s a heady mix of magic realism and family drama. There’s a flying halibut, some sledging, a little bit of flying, Jerry Lewis, and a turtle. Depp is Axel, a fish counter worker from New York (Depp describes Axel as a “more positive Holden Caulfield”) who is summoned to Arizona by his uncle, Lewis, who wants him to take over the family business, a Cadillac dealership, and marry a local girl. Unfortunately, Axel is more interested in the dreams of fish. Depp chose to work with Yugoslav director Kusturica alter seeing his earlier film, Time of the Gypsies, which moved him to declare, “If this film doesn’t affect you, you have no pulse.” If you can just go with the flow, the film is a total delight, and it won the special jury prize at the 1993 Berlin International Film Festival. Depp’s verdict: “Arizona Dream was the first time I watched myself where I didn’t feel sick.”
To go and make such a surreal film after the box-office hit Edward Scissorhands was incomprehensible to Hollywood’s money men but says Depp, “It’s refreshing to know now what I knew then, which really is, who cares about the numbers? When you’re able to, experience something like this, and live through something like this, and be involved with something as magical as this. You forget about how much a movie made in the box-office.” (1993)
DEAD MAN
A Western filmed in black-and-white that dances along the edge of incomprehension. Jarmusch’s film is an irony-free journey that is almost existential in its pointlessness and poetry. Depp plays William Blake, an accountant not a poet, who arrives in the town of Machine in the 1870 to take up a post that no longer exists. Turfed out of the factory that had offered him the job, he meets a young girl, shoots, and is shot by, her jealous lover. He then goes on the run, pursued for the man’s murder. He is befriended by an Indian who believes he is the poet Blake, even though he insists he isn’t and so wander off in search of Blake’s destiny. Depp is sweet and clueless as Blake, and Robert Mitchum makes his final screen appearance as the factory owner and father of the man Blake kills. Depp’s main co-star, Gary Farmer said that it’s “sort of a road movie with a horse”. Depp is, said Farmer, “pretty much half dead for most of the movie. It takes a lot of patience to be half dead. Especially for someone like Johnny.” Jarmusch claimed that Depp is “one of the most precise and focused people I’ve ever worked with… I’m more familiar with seeing him fall asleep on the couch with the TV on all night. But it somehow fits; he’s full of paradoxes.” (1995)
NICK OF TIME
A man’s daughter has been kidnapped and unless he assassinates a US State Governor she will be killed. To save the day the would-be patsy must rescue his daughter, try to keep the governor alive, and defeat the bad guy who, it transpires, has merely been hired by more powerful backers. And to add extra suspense the film takes place in real time, giving it a palpable air of tension and threat. No, I’m not talking about 24, but a forgotten Depp gem from 1995, which saw him cast as an ordinary Joe, an accountant – again – and father, caught up in extraordinary circumstances.
Depp makes an interesting action hero, never entirely comfortable holding a weapon and constantly trying to outwit rather than outfight his foes. This man is no John McLane. That his nemesis is played to the hilt with a marvelously unhinged performance from Christopher Walken only adds to the value. Not a great film, but it showed the way for 24 and gave Depp a chance to some something very different for a change -be ordinary. He was accused of selling out but he refutes that. “I read the screenplay and liked it a lot. I was on the edge of my seat when I read this thing. I wanted to do it, and I wanted to work with John Badham. I also wanted to work with Christopher Walken, whom I’ve always admired.” He also insists it was nice to play someone normal for a change. “What happened to me for a while is that people started calling me
‘oddball’. They thought I could only play these outcasts. So, this was a chance to play something really straight.” (1995)
THE MAN WHO CRIED
Depp plays a character with almost no dialogue in a haunting vision of Paris before and after Nazi occupation as seen through the eyes of a Russian emigrge, played by long-time Depp co-star Christina Ricci. Depp wanders enigmatically in and out of the film, a gypsy character riding a large white horse, and doesn’t really do a huge amount except look broody and magnificent. It’s almost as if he’s making a silent movie, and it’s startling how much he can communicate with just his face and eyes. This is a visually rich movie from director Sally Potter, full of subtext and muted character that manages to be both silent and operatic. (2000)
