If you happened to have Johnny Depp standing naked in front of you, he
wouldn’t need to say a word to tell you about his life. It would all be
there, etched into his part-Cherokee skin: the 11 tattoos that cover his
arms and fingers and torso, homages to his loves and obsessions. There’s the
one of “Betty Sue”, his mother; “Lily-Rose”, his six-year-old daughter, over
his heart; “Jack”, his three-year-old son, on his forearm; “Wino Forever”,
which used to read “Winona Forever” until he broke up with the actress
Winona Ryder. Then there are the welts and scars from the self- inflicted
knife cuts and the fights. If you know how to read it, Depp’s body is his
story, like an old Cherokee rug or an aboriginal painting: the dreamtime of
Johnny Depp.
And, fully clothed, as he is in front of me today, there are more clues: the
silver skull rings given to him by Iggy Pop, one on each hand; the silver
cross around his neck; the heavily scuffed work boots he always wears; the
brown leather strap on his right wrist — some of the accumulated fetishes of
his life.
Yet, perversely, Depp, who is now 42, has insinuated himself into our
consciousness not by revealing himself, but by masking himself in strange
and fantastical guises: the tormented man-child Edward Scissorhands; Ed
Wood, Hollywood’s worst but most optimistic movie director; Roald Dahl’s
strangely disturbing Willy Wonka; the manic Hunter S Thompson; the
mysterious JM Barrie in Finding Neverland; and the louche Captain Jack
Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, for which he got his first best-actor
Oscar nomination.
It is only now, in his latest film, that Hollywood’s most reluctant star,
finally at ease with himself, has been prepared to strip away the masks. In
The Libertine, based on the hit play by Stephen Jeffreys, Depp gives a
performance that is as close as he has ever come to playing himself, or
himself as he once was — as John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester, the
great poet and playwright of Restoration England, and one of the most
scandalously dissolute rakes in history. It is directed by Laurence Dunmore,
and John Malkovich, who also produced, plays Charles II (with a delicious
prosthetic nose). Samantha Morton is the actress Mrs Elizabeth Barry, with
whom Rochester falls in love.
The film is dark and smelly and absolutely filthy — in every sense. Depp plays
the decadent earl, who died in the horrible agonies of syphilis at the age
of 33, with such furious abandon and seductive intensity that it has to be
the most dangerous and thrilling performance of his career. Indeed, the film
has been sitting on the shelf for a year, as its American distributors have
fretted over how to present it to the prudish domestic audience. Yet Depp’s
performance should banish any doubts that he is the most powerful and
versatile American film actor of his generation. The power comes from what
the performance reveals about Depp, not what bits of actorly business he
hides behind. It is The Portrait of Johnny Depp as a Young Man.
The actor himself says it is a part he is happy he didn’t try to play a decade
ago, when it was first mooted. Back then — until he caught a glimpse of the
French actress and pop star Vanessa Paradis across the lobby of the Hôtel
Costes in Paris, in 1998, and was “ruined”, as he puts it — he had been
living the life of a modern-day libertine.
“To play Rochester, it needed me to be on a solid foundation: a couple of
kids, my girl, a simple life, understanding where I am in the world,” he
says. “Then, I would have missed the point. I would have tried to live the
part. That would have been a mistake.
“Early on in my research, I thought the guy was an absolute hedonist, but I
was wrong,” he says. We are sitting in the standard Beverly Hills hotel room
provided for such meetings, and he is alternately scratching his wispy beard
or dragging on a hand-rolled cigarette. When he smiles, it is with the
disconcerting gold gnashers of the pirate Jack Sparrow: Depp is in the
middle of shooting the two sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean in the
Bahamas. “Rochester was a guy who felt too much, and if you go back through
history, up to today, you’ll find these hypersensitive guys — Shane
MacGowan, Jack Kerouac, Hunter Thompson — and that was the route they found
to numb the pain: self-medicating to avoid thinking about what was actually
happening.”
Since he met Paradis — they spend much of the year with their two young
children on a small farm near St Tropez — Depp has grounded himself in a
much simpler life than he ever dreamt he would find. It took him a long time
to get there. For many years, deeply conflicted about his growing celebrity,
Depp, like Rochester, Kerouac and his late friend Thompson, “self-medicated”
— in his case, with neat bourbon and pills and pot. He burnt through a
serial harem of beautiful and troubled girlfriends, including Kate Moss,
Winona Ryder, Jennifer Grey and Sherilyn Fenn. He trashed hotel rooms. He
attacked the paparazzi with two-by-fours when they intruded. He spent nights
in jail. Close friends such as River Phoenix died around him. Nobody in
Hollywood would have been surprised if, like Rochester, Depp had died in his
thirties. Even he acknowledges that “there were times when it was a wonder I
survived”.
The thing is, Depp never planned to be an actor. He comes from a working-class
family in Kentucky, who moved to Florida when he was young, never settling
anywhere for more than a few months. He says that they may have moved 30
times before his father finally left, when Depp was 15. To deal with the
pain of his family’s often violent troubles, he pretty much locked himself
in his bedroom for a year when he was 12 and taught himself to play a $25
electric guitar that his uncle, a preacher, had bought him, learning from
records his older brother turned him on to: Van Morrison, Dylan, Aerosmith
and, later, the Clash and the Ramones. His brother also turned him on to
Jack Kerouac.
Thus inspired, he dropped out of school when he was 16. His band, the Kids,
had some minor success, opening for his hero, Iggy Pop. By the time he was
20, he was in Hollywood, married to a make-up artist, crashing on the floor
of the actor Nicolas Cage, his wife’s former boyfriend, and telemarketing
pens to survive. Cage suggested he try acting, and he quickly landed roles
in the horror movie A Nightmare on Elm Street and Oliver Stone’s Platoon.
It was being cast as the lead in the television series 21 Jump Street,
however, that kick-started his career. Depp played a teenage high-school
cop, a kind of hip David Cassidy, and he hated everything about it. Most of
all, he hated feeling he was a commodity. He managed to get out of his
seven-year contract after four and began to find more fulfilment in the
offbeat film roles he took. They reflected his deep unease with his
celebrity. He often played characters — Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, even
Hunter Thompson — who retained an innocence and purity that Depp sensed he
had lost.
“For a number of years, I self-medicated because I couldn’t quite figure it
out,” he recalls. “I thought a simple life was an impossibility. I thought I
was just destined to be ‘novelty boy’ until I wasn’t ‘novelty boy’ any more.
‘Didn’t you used to be Johnny Depp?’ It flipped me out. It was a weird
period.”
Weird indeed, exemplified by his arrest in 1994 for trashing the New York
hotel room he was staying in with his then girlfriend, Moss. (Depp defends
her in her recent troubles, saying he is “appalled and shocked at the kind
of vicious attacks” on her in the press. He said much the same after another
troubled former girlfriend, Ryder, was convicted of shoplifting.) Depp later
claimed — channelling William Burroughs — that he had smashed up the hotel
room because “there was a bug in the place that I was trying to kill. This
thing had tried to attack me and tried to suck my blood — a big cockroach”.
However amusing it might be in retrospect, Depp’s friends and family were
becoming increasingly concerned about his “self-medicating”. In the
early 1990s, they staged an intervention, warning him that he was killing
himself. For a while, he stopped everything, which made it even more
devastating when Phoenix died of an overdose outside the Viper Room, the hip
music club in Los Angeles that Depp part-owned.
As confused as he may have been, Depp had succeeded in completely befuddling
Hollywood. He clearly had the potential to be a huge star, yet the studios
couldn’t figure out why he had walked away from sure-fire hits such as Speed
and Legends of the Fall. Between 1989 and 1998, none of his films grossed
more than $55m in America, yet almost all are interesting. It was only in
2003, when he put on his most deliciously obscuring disguise — the gold
teeth, the kohl- encrusted eyes, the beaded hair, the oddly effete
mannerisms — as Captain Jack Sparrow that he truly became a big
international movie star. At first, however, top Disney executives were
horrified by his portrayal.
“Disney gave me such a hullabaloo about what I was doing with the character,
the teeth, all the beads hanging and the dreadlocks,” recalls Depp, who had
partly based his characterisation on the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards. “I
would get these phone calls from upper echelons, team Disney, and it would
be like, ‘Okay, okay, what are you doing with your hands? Is he drunk? Is he
gay? What is he?’ From what I understand, Michael Eisner (the Disney
chairman) hated it so much that the words actually came out of his mouth,
‘He’s ruining the film.’ Which really killed me, of course — it made me
laugh. Bless him.”
Of course, the rest is history. One of the biggest hits in Disney history, the
film took more than $650m worldwide at the box office and now its two
sequels are being shot back-to-back, with Depp said to be earning more than
$20m for each one. Oddly, he doesn’t seem uncomfortable with his new
superstardom — mainly, I think, because he has created, in Captain Jack, the
kind of timeless character his children can love.
Although Depp travels with his family, as he sits today dangerously close to
what he laughingly calls “the beast of Hollywood”, you can sense his
palpable nostalgia for France and the life in which he has finally found
himself.
“France has given me the opportunity to live a basic and simple life with my
kiddies, a life of normalcy,” he says. “The nearest village has 1,500
people. I can take a ride into the village and go to the little local bar
and have coffee with my girl, and people say, ‘Hello, Johnny, how are you?’
I’m not looking round the periphery for the paparazzi. You drive back home
and walk in the vegetable garden with your kids and have a nice lunch — you
know, real life, real life, not any of the hoopla that surrounds the
industry here.”
Let’s hope he gets back there soon.
The Libertine is on general release
