UK Premiere February 1995
Now you see Johnny Depp, now you don’t
Johnny Depp believes in ghosts. He has come to this haunted place looking for one in particular, a little girl wearing a silk party dress with a powder blue sash. She is often heard playing in the room across the hall from where Depp is sleeping in the Mackay Mansion, a three-story Victorian built high in the mountains of Nevada.
The small spirit likes the room. A cranberry glass chandelier casts spirals of ruby light upon shelf after shelf, each filled with antique French and German porcelain dolls. Side by side they sit, forty pairs of eyes staring toward the door, waiting for her.
Depp waits as well. “I want to run into some spirits here!” he says eagerly. When he isn’t gazing across the hall, he’s shooting Jim Jarmusch’s film Dead Man, a western set in the late 1800s, in which he finds his mug on a wanted poster. “When I was a kid I used to have these dreams,” says Depp. “But they weren’t dreams. I was awake, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. And a face would come to me.