Johnny Depp rips through Restoration England with a bottle of wine under one arm, a whore under the other – By Matthew Rose.
In the mid-’90s, John Malkovich approached Depp about starring as the earl in this adaptation of Stephen Jeffreys’s play, after portraying the rake himself at the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago. “My first reaction was, ‘Why not you?’ ” Depp recalls. ” ‘You’re so good. You should do it.’ And he said, ‘No, no, no, I want you to play it.’ ” Politeness aside, it’s a raunchy role Depp was born to play: Think Jack Sparrow meets the Marquis de Sade.
