Johnny Depp Says Talk That He Sold Out to Commercial Success Didn’t Worry Him: ‘If I Was Going to Do Something, It Had to Be on My Terms … Because I Don’t Want to Live a Lie. You Really Don’t Want to Look Back on Your Life and Go, ‘I Was a Complete Fraud”
In a Press Release by Newsweek posted on Sunday, June 18, 2006, Senior Writer Sean Smith interviews Johnny for the June 26 cover story. Tom Cruise and Commercial Success now they go together. But Depp and Commercial success? Not before Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl which grossed $653 million worldwide, made Depp a $20 million man and earned him an Oscar nomination.
Smith writes that it was Depp’s desire to make a movie for his kids that led him to “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl,” but studio executives were nonplused when they began to see the footage of Depp in character. Initially conceived as a young Burt Lancaster, Depp had reimagined Capt. Jack Sparrow as a debauched, vain, slightly fey rock star, inspired by Rolling Stones icon Keith Richards and cartoon skunk Pepe Le Pew. “The studio was, like, ‘Is he gay? Is he drunk? We don’t know what he’s doing!’,” says producer Jerry Bruckheimer. “It took a little while to calm everybody down.”
Depp’s off-kilter performance, of course, was the very thing that catapulted “Pirates” into a cultural phenomenon. “First of all, Johnny is a pirate in real life,” says director John Waters. “It’s the closest part he’s ever played to his real self, but the fact that he played it kind of nelly was a big risk. If only real gay pirates were that much fun.” [more…]
https://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060618/nysu011.html?.v=58
