A pirate's life for Johnny Depp

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A pirate's life for Johnny Depp

The swashbuckling actor has always done things on his terms -- and it has served him well

By BRUCE KIRKLAND -- Toronto Sun

LOS ANGELES -- Johnny Depp was a pirate long before he played one. Breaking rules about leading men movie stars, he has made a spectacular career out of giving Hollywood what it doesn't want: An eccentric, tattooed maverick who inspires women to swoon and whom men admire.

Depp proudly calls it "a career of failure" because, by doing what he wanted and not what would sell, he rarely scored at the box office and never had a megahit.

But he screwed that status up royally in 2003. With Depp playing the slightly mad fool Captain Jack Sparrow, Pirates Of The Caribbean: The Curse Of The Black Pearl turned into a pop-culture phenomenon. It was also a $654 million worldwide box-office hit.

Then Depp scored his first Oscar nomination, as best actor. Despite Jack Sparrow's personal hygiene problems and Depp's own ragged appearance in real life, People magazine named him "the sexiest man alive" that year. For the first time, feral Johnny Depp was a bona fide superstar.

Two Pirates Of The Caribbean sequels promptly set sail. The first, Dead Man's Chest, opens Friday with a cliffhanger ending. The next one is due in summer of 2007. In concert with Dead Man's Chest, Pirates products are filling up store shelves. Jack Sparrow's face, with Depp flashing gold-capped teeth, is yo-ho-ho-ing on the sides of cereal boxes.

"I've still got a couple of failures under my belt," the still boyish-looking Depp, 43, says with a sly grin. His eyes twinkle as they peer out from under the wide brim of his aged Borsalino hat. He wears a funky necklace and wristband adornments. His left knee jumps out of the gaping hole in his distressed blue jeans. He wears a simple white


T-shirt. The gold teeth are in place for the next phase of Pirates filming in August. He looks cool. He talks defiantly.

"It would have been nice to do that 20 years ago -- but I didn't," he says of scoring a megahit. "And it would have been nice to do that 10 years ago -- but I didn't."

You get the idea quickly that, despite the success of Pirates and then the $475 million generated worldwide by his pal Tim Burton's Charlie And The Chocolate Factory remake, Depp wants to remain a maverick.

"The fact that Pirates did as well as it did and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory did as well as it did is kind of great," Depp says. "But it's not going to make me change my approach to the choices (I make) and to the work. I still do exactly the same thing that I always did. I just do my work."

Nor does he really accept that his "career of failure" is actually a problem, or even a true failure. "All those movies that, by Hollywood definition or by industry definition, were failures, to me were great successes," Depp says of his pre-Pirates past. "All of them!"

Pirates co-star Orlando Bloom says the most important lesson the veteran Depp taught him is: "It's about the experience." Bloom recounts a key conversation: "He said to me really early on, 'I've made a career out of making movies that are failures, or considered failures.' And, to me, he's had one of the most courageous, exciting, spontaneous careers to date. So, sometimes, you have to take the knock."

The "failed" films Depp is talking about comprise almost everything after his TV show 21 Jump Street, including Edward Scissorhands, Arizona Dream, Benny & Joon, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Ed Wood, Don Juan DeMarco, Dead Man, Donnie Brasco, his own disastrous directorial debut The Brave, Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, The Ninth Gate, The Astronaut's Wife, Sleepy Hollow, Before Night Falls, Chocolat, Blow and From Hell.

Some of those did reasonably well at the box office, some bombed. None of that matters to Depp and he does not plan to change his approach just to court more megahits. Nor position himself for more Oscar nominations, following the 2003 nom for Pirates and the 2004 nom for playing Peter Pan author-playwright J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland.

"I think there was a fluke misspelling," he says of having his name pop up in the Academy Award rolls for Pirates. "I think someone somewhere just counted wrong."

Depp flashes a smile. "I was very surprised," he says of the honour. "I'm still surprised. It was never anything I was striving for. It never, ever in the darkest, deepest recesses of my brain or heart (occurred to me) to go for that kind of thing. I never expected it, ever. So I was really surprised. It didn't make sense to me."

Depp tries to explain why he has remained outside of the Hollywood mainstream, even though he prefers not to use the term "outsider" to describe himself. The story goes back to 21 Jump Street, when the Kentucky-born, Florida-raised Depp got his break as the sexy star of this youth-oriented series. He was sold as a stud, as a product.

"Having been forced into the role of 'product' at that time was a real shocker," Depp says. "It was a very uncomfortable situation and I didn't get a handle on it and it wasn't on my terms at all."

He made a promise to himself that, "once I was out of that contract, this is the direction I'm going: I will only do those things that I feel are right for me and it's no one else's decision. I'm going to do that whether it works or fails miserably. That's why it was really surprising -- and still is -- that I was able to keep going, that I was able to keep getting jobs doing films and keep trying different things with these characters and stuff."

It is well known that, during production on the original Pirates, Disney executives -- including the now deposed Michael Eisner -- were freaked out because of how eccentric Depp chose to play Jack Sparrow. He teetered on land, like a man who spent his life balanced on the rolling deck of a ship. He drank, swore, *****d, lied and played the coward if it suited his purposes. Depp says he was loosely inspired by a combination of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and cartoon character Pepe Le Pew. Eisner thought he was nuts.

Depp kept his job only because producer Jerry Bruckheimer, a man with real power in Hollywood, protected him, supporting the eccentric performance choices. Now, of course, it is not a problem. Critics, the public and the Academy loved what Depp did. Disney executives fell into line.

"I think they got used to his performance," Bruckheimer says dryly now. "I think they were much more comfortable with the way we portrayed the characters once they saw success on the first one. So they embraced it."

Director Gore Verbinski figures it was no stretch for Depp to play the role the way he did in The Curse Of The Black Pearl and how he continues to do in Dead Man's Chest, with a little more desperation built in this time because of the story line. "I think this is the closest thing to who Johnny really is. It's the easiest thing for him."

Depp, says Verbinski, is obviously not a traditional leading man. In the Pirates movies, "he gets to weave through the story in a Lee Marvin, Cat Ballou sort of style."

Depp says it was surprisingly easy to slide back into Jack Sparrow's skin for the sequel, despite the three years that had passed. Back on location in the Caribbean, when hurricanes did not force the production to evacuate, Depp felt secure. "It was funny, you know. Just simply going through that process again, going through makeup and hair and then buckling myself into the costume, it was like ... it just felt so natural, so normal, so right."

Depp, as he always is, was also generous to his fellow cast and crew members. Depp gives co-stars Bloom, Keira Knightley, Jonathan Pryce et al lots of the credit for the original movie's success, along with director Verbinski, producer Bruckheimer and writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. As a character, Jack Sparrow also gives moments over to others in Dead Man's Chest, even though he could easily steal every scene.

"I don't know if it's me being so generous," Depp says humbly. "It was very important and all-around agreed that it shouldn't be the Captain Jack Sparrow thing. I think that really would have been the wrong way to go."