He’s played a pirate, Willy Wonka and the worst film director in the world. Stephen Collings looks back at the career of Johnny Depp.
When Captain Jack Sparrow made his perfectly timed entrance on the bow of a sinking ship in 2003’s Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl, it also marked the arrival of a new Johnny Depp, one who learned to stop worrying and love the mainstream.
For almost 15 years, Depp’s chosen career path always suggested a man reluctant to embrace his A-list status, sidestepping a succession of blockbuster vehicles, including Speed, The Matrix and Interview With A Vampire, in favour of arthouse flicks like The Man Who Cried, and playing the muse to Hollywood’s modern auteurs, Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam. Like Burton, Depp has always shared the same maverick approach to his selection of films, crossing the occasional mainstream hit (Donnie Brasco) with the marginal, avant-garde feature (Dead Man).
But this summer sees Depp cast off on the good ship blockbuster again in Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. For all the superhumans and mutants vying for our attention, Depp’s dry-witted reprobate looks set to steal the hearts of the movie-going masses while making off with critical kudos, with a single wink of a kohl-rimmed eye. But of all the routes to Hollywood superstardom, Depp’s has been perhaps the least direct.
Born John Christopher Depp III in 1963, Depp started out as a gigging musician before Nicholas Cage, the ex-boyfriend of his then wife, so convinced of his onscreen potential, persuaded the young rocker to take on an agent. His fleeting debut roles in A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) and Platoon (1986) aside, Depp’s real celluloid breakthrough was starring in John Waters’ camp 50s pastiche, Cry Baby (1990). Pouting his way through the gleefully trashy proceedings, Depp’s titular delinquent openly mocked his own poster-boy persona from the hit TV series 21 Jump Street. However, it was his lead role in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands that propelled the self-effacing star into the limelight and onto the front pages, and importantly for Depp, offered escape from his TV teen-dream hell. Amazingly, 20th Century Fox insisted that Burton meet with wacky Scientologist Tom Cruise for the role of his sharp-fingered misfit, but Burton knew that he had found his muse (and future godfather to his son) in the doe-eyed Depp.
Somewhere between method actor and mime artiste, it is already ascribed in movie folklore that Depp based Jack Sparrow on Keith Richards, the tree-climbing Rolling Stone, but less well-known is that Depp’s abstract inspiration for the semi-mute Scissorhands were pets that he’d owned, while Burton claimed that for the role of Ed Wood (1994), Depp pitched his performance somewhere between Ronald Reagan and a ventriloquist’s dummy. The director has often lauded Depp’s “silent movie qualities”, further in evidence with his Chaplin-esque turn in Benny & Joon (1993). But rather than resting on his laurels (and hardys), Depp continued to choose a succession of challenging and varied roles, from playing alongside Marlon Brando in Don Juan DeMarco (1995), and sparring with Al Pacino in Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco (1997), to heading Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), a part written specifically for him.
But it was his reunion with Tim Burton for the aforementioned Ed Wood that has arguably produced Depp’s finest performance to date with the director. As the eponymous “worst director ever” in Burton’s affectionate biopic, Depp’s Wood is a sympathetic outsider whose delusions of talent are no obstacle to his grand ambitions and wide-eyed enthusiasm. Bad moviemaking was never so good, and Wood manages to turn every setback into optimism and opportunity –“Really? Worst film you ever saw? Well, my next one will be better!”
However, Depp’s own auteurist ambitions took a dent, despite convincing the notoriously difficult Brando to star in his only directorial effort to date, The Brave (1997). Although the film received a glowing reception from a Cannes audience that counted Bertolucci and Antonioni amongst its number, US critics were less kind and, as a result, Depp refused to exhibit the film Stateside.
The following year, Depp was back on top form in Terry Gilliam’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, based on Hunter S. Thompson’s supposedly unfilmable novel. Depp’s noirish internal monologue was brilliantly contrasted with his drug-induced physical calamities. Such was the level of narcotic consumption in the film, a Fear And Loathing drinking game actually exists in which a vodka shot is downed every time an illegal drug is either mentioned, imbibed, injected or otherwise (I once attempted this myself and I can’t recall the end credits).
A close personal friend of the late gonzo writer, Depp bunked down with Thompson while researching the role, even indulging in the writer’s favourite pastime of blowing up various items. In tribute, Depp paid for the gonzo fist-shaped canon that shot the novelist’s ashes into the great beyond, and is currently working on his second Thompson adaptation, The Rum Diary, slated to be helmed by Withnail & I writer and director, Bruce Robinson.
For an actor so discerning in his professional life, his private reputation in the mid 1990s saw Depp stumble down the well-trodden path of paparazzi scraps, hotel room trashing and celebrity coupledom with tabloid-friendly Winona Ryder and Kate Moss, reaching a personal low with the untimely death of friend River Phoenix outside the Viper Room nightclub he partly owned. Stepping off the Hollywood merry-go-round, Depp has since settled in the south of France with partner Vanessa Paradis and their two children, Lily-Rose and Jack, and now appears content with his newfound Gallic lifestyle, even commenting that, “Anything I've done up till 27 May, 1999, was kind of an illusion, existing without living. My daughter - the birth of my daughter - gave me life.”
1999 was also the year that saw Depp reunite with Burton once more to play Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow (role inspiration: super-sleuth Angela Lansbury) where traditional heroics are undermined by Depp’s performance as an incompetent with trembling hands, quivering voice and an expression fixed on the precipice of nausea. Yet, like all his creations, Ichabod remains a sympathetic and fundamentally likeable character.
However, Depp’s filmography is not without some low points. The recent Secret Window (2004) was an unremarkable thriller, while the stylish but bloodless From Hell (2001) found Depp’s cockney accent wanting, although it must be said co-star Heather Graham stole the Dick Van Dyke award for her ‘aitch-dropping prostitute.
Whilst Depp’s recent output can be directly attributed to his most rewarding role as a father, he is certainly making no concessions to his art. For an actor with such a maverick reputation for playing oddballs and eccentrics, accepting the role of Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates Of The Caribbean, a film based on the famous Disneyland ride, raised a few eyebrows in the industry. Indeed, when watching the dailies, ‘house of mouse’ executives began to sweat over Depp’s deliciously theatrical performance, questioning, “Is he drunk? Is he gay?” In fact, Depp cannily reasoned that pirates were the rock ‘n’ roll stars of their day and in the process turned a standard swashbuckling adventure into the must-see film of 2003, while Captain Jack became the film’s true treasure, plundering box office gold and two sequels in the process. Filmed back-to-back, the third instalment of the Pirates trilogy is set for our screens sometime in 2007, and Depp’s rising star shows no sign of faltering - his signature has become one of the most sought-after in Hollywood.
Even Burton, who usually has to fight for his choice of actor, noticed the change of the industry’s stony heart when pitching ideas for 2005’s remake of Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. In fact, for Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, the studio bosses suggested Depp for Willy Wonka “before I could even utter the words,” Burton said. “I just thought, ‘What took you guys so long? It’s about time.’” During shooting, Depp also recorded his vocal part for Burton’s animated feature, Corpse Bride, bringing their collaborative total to five, with a further Burton-Depp feature in the offing in a mooted musical version of Sweeney Todd.
Courted by the mainstream yet respected by the avant garde, Depp now holds a unique place within the industry, and despite his 43 years, Depp’s enviably youthful looks afford the actor the versatility to play across the age ranges, while his understated turn as author JM Barrie in Neverland (2004) shows that the actor is not above playing a convincing romantic lead. But playing it straight is not something we’ve come to expect from Johnny Depp, and his films are all the better for it.
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