Johnny Depp: Johnny Darko
At Claridge’s Hotel in London, squirreled away at a table in the bar, over a relaxing glass of red wine, Johnny Depp lighted one of his hand-rolled cigarettes, grinned, leaned back, exhaled a plume and said, “Fuck it,” quite happily. It was a Tuesday afternoon. Earlier, he’d thought to go to the Dorchester Hotel, one of his other usual haunts, but was put off by all the paparazzi and professional autograph hounds milling around, so he ended up here, talking about the movie he’d just finished shooting, the remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, his fourth film in fifteen years with director Tim Burton. “I have no idea what I did,” he said, which is what he basically says about all his performances. “And I have no idea if it’s anywhere near where it needs to be. I can only go by what I feel, and I feel good.”
He smiled his slightly fractured, slightly raffish, entirely vulnerable smile and said that he was looking forward to a few months off before relocating himself and his family — his girlfriend of seven years, French pop singer and actress Vanessa Paradis, and their two children, Jack, 2, and Lily-Rose Melody, 5 — to Los Angeles to begin making the sequel to Pirates of the Caribbean, the 2003 blockbuster that got him his first Oscar nomination, in the Best Actor category, for his swishy rendering of Capt. Jack Sparrow. “Between now and then, what I’m going to do, I guess, is slobber and drool, space out, play Barbies with my daughter and sword-fight with my son,” he said. As well, he let it be known that if anything like Lily-Rose’s Barbie train set was in his immediate future, he might just go nuts. “I mean, those things are a real bastard to put together,” he muttered, still smoking and obviously trying to remain calm. “So frustrating that they will send you onto the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
Depp, 41, was silent for a moment, then added that if the gods really wanted to smile on him, they would also help him avoid one other thing: an Oscar nomination for his steadfast, low-key portrayal of Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie, in Finding Neverland, because that would mean he’d actually have to attend the Oscars, and while such a thing could not, of course, match the nerve-shivering hell of constructing a Barbie train set, it could, nonetheless, lead to some discomfort, just as it did when he and Paradis went to the Oscars after the Pirates nod. “All Vanessa and I could think of was “When and where can we go smoke?’ ” he said, frowning. “And, Where can we get a drink?’ And, ‘When is it over?’ And, ‘Please, don’t let me win.’ It was such a shock, to get the news that I’d been nominated. My first reaction was “Why?” On one level I was flattered; but it’s not what I’m working for. And when I didn’t win the Thing — oh, I was ecstatic. Absolutely ecstatic. I applauded the lucky winner [Sean Penn] and said, ‘Thank God!'”
On the other hand, had he won, he probably would have said, “Fuck it,” and then manfully gotten up, given his little speech, taken the Thing home and pawned it off on his kids to play with. But that’s Depp for you and has been for a very long time. He has a number of words he tries to live by. From the poem Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann: “In the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy.” From the preface to The Time of Tour Life, by William Saroyan: “Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these are the things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in all things that which shines and is beyond corruption.” And from Depp himself, from deep within himself, when faced with his fears, doubts, anxieties, uncertainties and ambivalences, which are legion: “Fuck it!”
“I’ve ended up saying it in life a lot and in the work a lot, and I’ve always found it very helpful,” he said. “Yes,” he went on, between sips of red wine, “‘Fuck it,’ over the years, has always been pretty soothing.”
Not so very long ago, the Depp name in marquee lights wasn’t exactly a heart-thumping box-office draw. Burned by his first big experience in Hollywood, in the late Eighties, when the Fox network turned him into a David Cassidy-type teen idol on the TV show 21 Jump Street, he decided right then to never again be part of anyone’s machine but his own, and his own machine is anything but conventional; it’s positively, infernally Rube Goldberg-ian, which has left him swerving hither and yon though roles that call for great big bunches of silence (Secret Window), the wearing of swell, pink angora sweaters (Ed Wood), hands that can prune hedges (Edward Scissorhands), a way with women that he may in fact possess (Don Juan DeMarco) and that have him strutting through the L.A. airport, in a sweet white suit, fat shades covering his eyes, to the tune of Ram Jam’s “Black Betty” (Blow), one of the greatest moments in all of cinema, bama lam bama lam. Critics love him, magazine writers fawn over him, and he’s developed a fan base like no other (with many a pubic hair winding up in his daily mail), largely because his performances are most often off-kilter, angled and light, full of soul, tenderness, toughness, sincerity and grace, expressed through the liquid cadences of his voice and his diction, his beautiful man-boy face, the unerring and particular use of limbs to amplify and enhance, the whole shebang centrifically whipped together, and so forth. One could go on.
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