The Sunday Times - 12 December 2010
Culture Magazine
by Will Lawrence
FAR FROM ORDINARY; In his new film, Johnny Depp plays a regular bloke. Naturally, the enigmatic star finds normal people 'incredibly weird' — but not half as surreal as co-star Angelina Jolie's daily life, he tells Will Lawrence
Johnny Depp is extolling the therapeutic virtues of his big pyjamas. He's not wearing them at the moment, you understand, but his bedtime sleeping habits have made an unlikely appearance midway through our conversation. "You might find this shocking, but I'm not really a pyjama-wearing type of guy," he offers. "I lean towards insomnia in life, which a lot of us do, and this pal of mine who I've made a couple of films with, Julian Schnabel, said, 'I've got just the answer for you.' He gave me these big baggy cotton pyjamas." He pauses to flick at one of the curtains of longish hair that frame his face. "And, honestly, I slept about 12 hours. It was like a miracle." He pauses once again, and leans in conspiratorially, "But you don't want to abuse pyjamas," he whispers. "You get used to them and you're screwed..."
He's been the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, an other worldly Willy Wonka, the gap-toothed Mad Hatter and that lovable, dandified purveyor of box-office treasures, Captain Jack Sparrow. Yet arguably the most beguiling character played by the 47-year-old superstar sitting before me is that of Depp himself, the sometime pyjama wearing insomniac actor. Once upon a time, before Captain Jack and the Pirates had conquered the box office to the tune of $2 billion, he had flitted around on the periphery of the public consciousness, popping up on screen as a fragile, tender-hearted protagonist, regularly encased in a peculiar, macabre or just plain madcap facade — from the fantastically fingered Edward Scissorhands, through Ed Wood, Bill Blake (Dead Man) and Raoul Duke (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), to Ichabod Crane (Sleepy Hollow). Take your pick.
He charmed the critics and delighted his fans, although he rarely scored sizeable commercial returns. Instead, he emerged as something of a mascot for the lost and lonely, a patron saint of waifs and strays. One wag dubbed him "cinema's very own St Jude". Once Captain Jack set sail in 2003, however, Depp's profile changed. His character, and his creation (famously disliked by the Disney executives who got the first look at the gold-toothed pirate) drives the franchise; the fourth film, On Stranger Tides, is now in post-production, without Keira Knightley or Orlando Bloom, and will open next summer. "The same guys who a few years ago were saying that Johnny is box-office poison," the Hollywood magnate Harvey Weinstein told me, in the wake of the first Pirates movie, "well, now they're kissing his butt. But Johnny, he's so smart. He sees through all that bullshit."
Which only adds to the enigmatic actor's mystique: he's an A-list star who refuses to conform. He's a relative stranger to the world of red carpets, big-money romcoms and high-paying, high-octane action flicks. Indeed, the higher his star rises, the further he seems to melt back into the firmament, emerging for occasional gothic jaunts with his pal Tim Burton and for sporadic departures such as last year's gangster picture Public Enemies. He always disappears again quickly, a real-life will-o'-the-wisp, truncating his press appearances while maintaining a roving lifestyle with his girlfriend, the French actress Vanessa Paradis, and their two children, Lily-Rose, 11, and Jack, 8. He's like a modern-day vagabond, albeit one equipped with a beautiful family and sizeable assets — his most recent movie, The Tourist, in which he stars opposite Angelina Jolie, paid him $20m.
We meet on a biting, sub-zero Paris day, and he arrives a mere 35 minutes late, which, for Depp, is tantamount to being early. "Sorry," he begins in his warm, considered tone, "but I just can't be on time. It's something built into my body that goes against the grain. I don't know why, but I've been late my entire life." Of course he has: Depp has always projected a definite cool, as much rock star as movie star, with the tangle of bracelets and silvery trinkets that festoons his neck and hands; swirls of greeny-blue ink adorn the musculature in between.
His everyday life, however, is a little more mundane. He's (almost) on time today because he has to pick up the kids from their Parisian school. "It's an important time of year," he notes, thinking of Lily-Rose and Jack, and impending (no doubt) last-minute shopping sprees. "And, with two kids, if I don't come up with the goods on Christmas morning, they'll beat me." His face turns grave. "Seriously, I'll be in big trouble."
It is almost five years since I last sat down with Depp, and beneath his glasses and tidily trimmed goatee, he doesn't appear to have aged at all. (Disappointingly, I'm almost a decade younger than him, yet feel several years older.) Our last full meeting was for the JM Barrie movie Finding Neverland, and Depp seems blessed with some of Peter Pan's attributes. "I do like the idea of staying a child for ever," he offers at one point. "And I think you really can. I've known plenty of people in their later years who were like little kids, had the energy of little children, the curiosity and fascination. I think we can keep that. It's important we keep that. Innocence and purity, they're things we don't really have in the world any more."
Depp's press appearances have become rare, but he's generous once he shows up, impish, almost collusive and surprisingly tactile. It could be an act, but I suspect not: a Japanese journalist receives a hug at one point in the day, while more than one of my peers goes in search of an autograph "for their children" and sees their wish granted. He projects the same warmth and romanticism, a dreaminess, even, that audiences have witnessed simmering in so many of his characters. "Innocence and purity are themes I'm fascinated with," he concedes, "because, for me at least, growing up in America in the 1960s, there was still some kind of innocence."
His upbringing was unorthodox, gypsylike; his father, a public works official, moved his family from job to job, town to town. Depp reckons there were at least 30 moves before the family settled in Florida, each one seeing toys, games, furniture and schoolwork left abandoned. "There's a whole family history of ours out there somewhere."
Which might explain his attitude to material objects — he's a bibliophile and collector (welcome diversions during sleepless nights, no doubt), his homes apparently brimming with the interesting and the arcane, including John Dillinger's derringer pistol and Jack Kerouac's last typewriter — although he recently told the singer Patti Smith that he doesn't own them, he's merely their current guardian.
He says he moved schools so often that he stopped introducing himself to other children. After his parents divorced, when he was 15, there were episodes of petty theft and vandalism, and a year later he dropped out of high school so he could go on the road with his band. "Being a kid, being a teenager on the road with the band, playing guitar and doing opening-act stuff — that was pretty influential, so that gypsy lifestyle, it became second nature."
For all the romantic connotations, Depp's upbringing left him feeling lonely and insecure: "I was miserable, self-defeating." He hurried into marriage, wedding a make-up artist, Lori Anne Allison, when he was only 20 years old. Their marriage lasted less than three years, and Depp says that, while they had a strong bond, he didn't fall in love until he hit his thirties. There was a high-profile relationship with Kate Moss in the mid- to late-1990s, but it was a French girl who stole his heart. He runs through the engaging story of how they met, a favourite anecdote of his. "I can remember, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 13 years ago," he recalls, "being here in Paris at the hotel where I was living. I was doing a film with Roman Polanski, The Ninth Gate, and across the room I saw this woman's back, and I saw this neck attached to the back, and I was sort of fascinated by it.
"Honestly, it was a very beautiful, sculptural thing, then suddenly the back and the neck turned, and it had a face, and it was Vanessa, and it looked at me, and walked across the room, and said, 'Hi, do you remember me?' I had met her years before, and at that moment, before I even said 'Hi, how are you?', I knew it was over — I was done." He laughs. "I was in big trouble from that second on."
Paradis had achieved stardom at just 14 with her worldwide hit song Joe le Taxi before flourishing as an actress and model, but the camera-shy couple have succeeded in raising their children away from the paparazzi's prying lenses. "My kids have grown up with fame as a part of their life, but they are so cool about it, it doesn't really faze them," Depp explains. "Vanessa and I and our kids, we don't have the same kind of weight on our shoulders that, say, Angie and Brad do. We are able to actually go to a restaurant now and again, have dinner with our kiddies, and, for the most part, people have been very respectful with regards to our life and our kids." He laughs. "But we just don't really go out very much."
His most recent film outing, The Tourist, saw Depp spend several months in Venice with "Angie and Brad" and their brood. "My kids were there for a bit as well, and her boy Maddox and my boy Jack were playing video games like savages." He says he was astonished by the level of intrusion into his co-star's life. "To wake up in the morning, have a cup of coffee, then ask your guy how many people are waiting outside, and the answer is 35... That's tough. Then you get into a boat and go to work, and there are three boats full of paparazzi following her? I wasn't pressured by it — I kind of got a good laugh out of it, because it's one of the most absurd and surreal things I've ever seen!" And one suspects he's seen a few.
The film in which they star is a classic thriller, the second feature from the German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who won an Oscar in 2007 for The Lives of Others. A remake of the French film Anthony Zimmer, it sees an apparently wide-eyed Depp drawn into a web of intrigue, danger and romance, courtesy of an enchanting Englishwoman, played by Jolie. It's a bit of a novelty for Depp, whose character, Frank, is almost painfully normal.
"After playing Captain Jack, Willy Wonka, the Mad Hatter, I thought it would be interesting to go after Mr Normal," he says. "And it was a challenge, the challenge being the fine line between the aspects of the character.
He's just an ordinary guy... a number of people I've met over the years, people considered hypernormal, I always thought they were incredibly weird. I knew this guy who used to travel all over the world to places where the street signs or laundries had the same name as him. He'd go photograph these things, even though he was a straight-up accountant, and I thought, 'This is the weirdest man I've ever met!'" Depp will step back into the web of weird next year, when he stars in the Hunter S Thompson adaptation The Rum Diary, directed by Bruce Robinson, who made the cult classic Withnail and I. "Hunter and I, many, many years ago, unearthed this script in his basement. He thought it was pretty good, and we made this deal in the middle of the night that we'd make it into a film and produce it together. A year or two later, we'd had meetings with financiers, etc. Our first choice to direct then was Bruce Robinson." Unfortunately, he had hated his one Hollywood venture, 1992's Jennifer Eight, and quit the business. "He didn't want anything to do with movies, understandably. Hunter made his exit, and I pursued Bruce like a bandit, a fiend, and we got him."
Depp uses the word "understandably" when referring to Robinson's decision to walk away from the industry. Has he also flirted with the idea of quitting? "Every day! Every single day." But he's still here? "If I feel I can offer something to the film or script, something I could do a little differently from another actor, not the same old thing, then that continues to intrigue me. But this industry is difficult, and it takes a lot to survive with integrity intact."
Depp points to an old mate, the rocker Keith Richards. "I can learn from him — he's a guy who had fame thrown at him before he'd started shaving, and 50 years later he's still as cool and down to earth as he always was: treats everyone the same. He's maintained himself, which is a difficult feat in this business."
Depp shouldn't worry. It certainly seems he's done the same — he can go to bed happy and sleep soundly. And, if he can't quite nod off, well, at least he's got those baggy cotton pyjamas.
Culture Magazine
by Will Lawrence
FAR FROM ORDINARY; In his new film, Johnny Depp plays a regular bloke. Naturally, the enigmatic star finds normal people 'incredibly weird' — but not half as surreal as co-star Angelina Jolie's daily life, he tells Will Lawrence
Johnny Depp is extolling the therapeutic virtues of his big pyjamas. He's not wearing them at the moment, you understand, but his bedtime sleeping habits have made an unlikely appearance midway through our conversation. "You might find this shocking, but I'm not really a pyjama-wearing type of guy," he offers. "I lean towards insomnia in life, which a lot of us do, and this pal of mine who I've made a couple of films with, Julian Schnabel, said, 'I've got just the answer for you.' He gave me these big baggy cotton pyjamas." He pauses to flick at one of the curtains of longish hair that frame his face. "And, honestly, I slept about 12 hours. It was like a miracle." He pauses once again, and leans in conspiratorially, "But you don't want to abuse pyjamas," he whispers. "You get used to them and you're screwed..."
He's been the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, an other worldly Willy Wonka, the gap-toothed Mad Hatter and that lovable, dandified purveyor of box-office treasures, Captain Jack Sparrow. Yet arguably the most beguiling character played by the 47-year-old superstar sitting before me is that of Depp himself, the sometime pyjama wearing insomniac actor. Once upon a time, before Captain Jack and the Pirates had conquered the box office to the tune of $2 billion, he had flitted around on the periphery of the public consciousness, popping up on screen as a fragile, tender-hearted protagonist, regularly encased in a peculiar, macabre or just plain madcap facade — from the fantastically fingered Edward Scissorhands, through Ed Wood, Bill Blake (Dead Man) and Raoul Duke (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), to Ichabod Crane (Sleepy Hollow). Take your pick.
He charmed the critics and delighted his fans, although he rarely scored sizeable commercial returns. Instead, he emerged as something of a mascot for the lost and lonely, a patron saint of waifs and strays. One wag dubbed him "cinema's very own St Jude". Once Captain Jack set sail in 2003, however, Depp's profile changed. His character, and his creation (famously disliked by the Disney executives who got the first look at the gold-toothed pirate) drives the franchise; the fourth film, On Stranger Tides, is now in post-production, without Keira Knightley or Orlando Bloom, and will open next summer. "The same guys who a few years ago were saying that Johnny is box-office poison," the Hollywood magnate Harvey Weinstein told me, in the wake of the first Pirates movie, "well, now they're kissing his butt. But Johnny, he's so smart. He sees through all that bullshit."
Which only adds to the enigmatic actor's mystique: he's an A-list star who refuses to conform. He's a relative stranger to the world of red carpets, big-money romcoms and high-paying, high-octane action flicks. Indeed, the higher his star rises, the further he seems to melt back into the firmament, emerging for occasional gothic jaunts with his pal Tim Burton and for sporadic departures such as last year's gangster picture Public Enemies. He always disappears again quickly, a real-life will-o'-the-wisp, truncating his press appearances while maintaining a roving lifestyle with his girlfriend, the French actress Vanessa Paradis, and their two children, Lily-Rose, 11, and Jack, 8. He's like a modern-day vagabond, albeit one equipped with a beautiful family and sizeable assets — his most recent movie, The Tourist, in which he stars opposite Angelina Jolie, paid him $20m.
We meet on a biting, sub-zero Paris day, and he arrives a mere 35 minutes late, which, for Depp, is tantamount to being early. "Sorry," he begins in his warm, considered tone, "but I just can't be on time. It's something built into my body that goes against the grain. I don't know why, but I've been late my entire life." Of course he has: Depp has always projected a definite cool, as much rock star as movie star, with the tangle of bracelets and silvery trinkets that festoons his neck and hands; swirls of greeny-blue ink adorn the musculature in between.
His everyday life, however, is a little more mundane. He's (almost) on time today because he has to pick up the kids from their Parisian school. "It's an important time of year," he notes, thinking of Lily-Rose and Jack, and impending (no doubt) last-minute shopping sprees. "And, with two kids, if I don't come up with the goods on Christmas morning, they'll beat me." His face turns grave. "Seriously, I'll be in big trouble."
It is almost five years since I last sat down with Depp, and beneath his glasses and tidily trimmed goatee, he doesn't appear to have aged at all. (Disappointingly, I'm almost a decade younger than him, yet feel several years older.) Our last full meeting was for the JM Barrie movie Finding Neverland, and Depp seems blessed with some of Peter Pan's attributes. "I do like the idea of staying a child for ever," he offers at one point. "And I think you really can. I've known plenty of people in their later years who were like little kids, had the energy of little children, the curiosity and fascination. I think we can keep that. It's important we keep that. Innocence and purity, they're things we don't really have in the world any more."
Depp's press appearances have become rare, but he's generous once he shows up, impish, almost collusive and surprisingly tactile. It could be an act, but I suspect not: a Japanese journalist receives a hug at one point in the day, while more than one of my peers goes in search of an autograph "for their children" and sees their wish granted. He projects the same warmth and romanticism, a dreaminess, even, that audiences have witnessed simmering in so many of his characters. "Innocence and purity are themes I'm fascinated with," he concedes, "because, for me at least, growing up in America in the 1960s, there was still some kind of innocence."
His upbringing was unorthodox, gypsylike; his father, a public works official, moved his family from job to job, town to town. Depp reckons there were at least 30 moves before the family settled in Florida, each one seeing toys, games, furniture and schoolwork left abandoned. "There's a whole family history of ours out there somewhere."
Which might explain his attitude to material objects — he's a bibliophile and collector (welcome diversions during sleepless nights, no doubt), his homes apparently brimming with the interesting and the arcane, including John Dillinger's derringer pistol and Jack Kerouac's last typewriter — although he recently told the singer Patti Smith that he doesn't own them, he's merely their current guardian.
He says he moved schools so often that he stopped introducing himself to other children. After his parents divorced, when he was 15, there were episodes of petty theft and vandalism, and a year later he dropped out of high school so he could go on the road with his band. "Being a kid, being a teenager on the road with the band, playing guitar and doing opening-act stuff — that was pretty influential, so that gypsy lifestyle, it became second nature."
For all the romantic connotations, Depp's upbringing left him feeling lonely and insecure: "I was miserable, self-defeating." He hurried into marriage, wedding a make-up artist, Lori Anne Allison, when he was only 20 years old. Their marriage lasted less than three years, and Depp says that, while they had a strong bond, he didn't fall in love until he hit his thirties. There was a high-profile relationship with Kate Moss in the mid- to late-1990s, but it was a French girl who stole his heart. He runs through the engaging story of how they met, a favourite anecdote of his. "I can remember, somewhere in the neighbourhood of 13 years ago," he recalls, "being here in Paris at the hotel where I was living. I was doing a film with Roman Polanski, The Ninth Gate, and across the room I saw this woman's back, and I saw this neck attached to the back, and I was sort of fascinated by it.
"Honestly, it was a very beautiful, sculptural thing, then suddenly the back and the neck turned, and it had a face, and it was Vanessa, and it looked at me, and walked across the room, and said, 'Hi, do you remember me?' I had met her years before, and at that moment, before I even said 'Hi, how are you?', I knew it was over — I was done." He laughs. "I was in big trouble from that second on."
Paradis had achieved stardom at just 14 with her worldwide hit song Joe le Taxi before flourishing as an actress and model, but the camera-shy couple have succeeded in raising their children away from the paparazzi's prying lenses. "My kids have grown up with fame as a part of their life, but they are so cool about it, it doesn't really faze them," Depp explains. "Vanessa and I and our kids, we don't have the same kind of weight on our shoulders that, say, Angie and Brad do. We are able to actually go to a restaurant now and again, have dinner with our kiddies, and, for the most part, people have been very respectful with regards to our life and our kids." He laughs. "But we just don't really go out very much."
His most recent film outing, The Tourist, saw Depp spend several months in Venice with "Angie and Brad" and their brood. "My kids were there for a bit as well, and her boy Maddox and my boy Jack were playing video games like savages." He says he was astonished by the level of intrusion into his co-star's life. "To wake up in the morning, have a cup of coffee, then ask your guy how many people are waiting outside, and the answer is 35... That's tough. Then you get into a boat and go to work, and there are three boats full of paparazzi following her? I wasn't pressured by it — I kind of got a good laugh out of it, because it's one of the most absurd and surreal things I've ever seen!" And one suspects he's seen a few.
The film in which they star is a classic thriller, the second feature from the German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who won an Oscar in 2007 for The Lives of Others. A remake of the French film Anthony Zimmer, it sees an apparently wide-eyed Depp drawn into a web of intrigue, danger and romance, courtesy of an enchanting Englishwoman, played by Jolie. It's a bit of a novelty for Depp, whose character, Frank, is almost painfully normal.
"After playing Captain Jack, Willy Wonka, the Mad Hatter, I thought it would be interesting to go after Mr Normal," he says. "And it was a challenge, the challenge being the fine line between the aspects of the character.
He's just an ordinary guy... a number of people I've met over the years, people considered hypernormal, I always thought they were incredibly weird. I knew this guy who used to travel all over the world to places where the street signs or laundries had the same name as him. He'd go photograph these things, even though he was a straight-up accountant, and I thought, 'This is the weirdest man I've ever met!'" Depp will step back into the web of weird next year, when he stars in the Hunter S Thompson adaptation The Rum Diary, directed by Bruce Robinson, who made the cult classic Withnail and I. "Hunter and I, many, many years ago, unearthed this script in his basement. He thought it was pretty good, and we made this deal in the middle of the night that we'd make it into a film and produce it together. A year or two later, we'd had meetings with financiers, etc. Our first choice to direct then was Bruce Robinson." Unfortunately, he had hated his one Hollywood venture, 1992's Jennifer Eight, and quit the business. "He didn't want anything to do with movies, understandably. Hunter made his exit, and I pursued Bruce like a bandit, a fiend, and we got him."
Depp uses the word "understandably" when referring to Robinson's decision to walk away from the industry. Has he also flirted with the idea of quitting? "Every day! Every single day." But he's still here? "If I feel I can offer something to the film or script, something I could do a little differently from another actor, not the same old thing, then that continues to intrigue me. But this industry is difficult, and it takes a lot to survive with integrity intact."
Depp points to an old mate, the rocker Keith Richards. "I can learn from him — he's a guy who had fame thrown at him before he'd started shaving, and 50 years later he's still as cool and down to earth as he always was: treats everyone the same. He's maintained himself, which is a difficult feat in this business."
Depp shouldn't worry. It certainly seems he's done the same — he can go to bed happy and sleep soundly. And, if he can't quite nod off, well, at least he's got those baggy cotton pyjamas.
