Johnny Depp: The Playboy Interviews (50 Years of the Playboy Interview)

About the Book

Copyright © 2012 Playboy Enterprises, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this interview or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For the full
Playboy
archive—including every Playboy Interview ever published—visit
i.playboy.com
.

About the Series:
In mid-1962,
Playboy
founder Hugh Hefner was given a partial transcript of an interview with Miles Davis. It covered jazz, of course, but it also included Davis’s ruminations on race, politics and culture. Fascinated, Hef sent the writer—future Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Alex Haley, an unknown at the time—back to glean even more opinion and insight from Davis. The resulting exchange, published in the September 1962 issue, became the first official Playboy Interview and kicked off a remarkable run of public inquisition that continues today—and that has featured just about every cultural titan of the last half century.

To celebrate the Interview’s 50th anniversary, the editors of
Playboy
have culled 50 of its most (in)famous Interviews and will publish them over the course of 50 weekdays (from September 4, 2012 to November 12, 2012) via Amazon’s Kindle Direct platform. Here are the interviews with Johnny Depp from the January 1996 and May 2004 issues.

Johnny Depp, January 1996

Johnny Depp looks rotten. Or so he says. The women on Sunset Boulevard would surely disagree. Many of them would marry him on the spot. But then Depp seldom bows to majority opinion. As he lights another cigarette and drinks more coffee at a bookstore cafe on Sunset, his attention flits to a bee—a killer bee encased in Lucite. It’s one of many oddball souvenirs he receives from friends and admirers. Bugs are serious business to Depp, who collects exotic paraphernalia. His career—the other subject under discussion at the table—is taken more lightly. Acting, he explains, is nothing but “making faces for cash.” Others take his work more seriously. Depp is “one of the great young actors,” says European director Emir Kusturica. Marlon Brando, Vincent Price and Faye Dunaway have said the same. Brando says that Depp should do Shakespeare, while Dunaway claims he is both a superb actor and a super kisser. The on-screen Depp is the world’s greatest lover; offscreen he’s a famed romancer of actresses and supermodels. “He doesn’t belong in show business,” his “Ed Wood” co-star Sarah Jessica Parker once remarked. “He belongs somewhere better.” Lasse Hallstrom, who directed him in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape,” says, “He has real ambitions, but he is deeply afraid of being considered pretentious.”

And one other thing: He looks great in a dress.

At 32, Johnny Depp is entering the heart of what he calls, with casual self-deprecation, “my quote-unquote career.” His is a goofy oeuvre, perhaps most impressive because he’s carved a unique niche without making a box office hit. Thus far, the Kentucky-born Depp has made misfit movies. He was a boy monster in “Edward Scissorhands,” top-hatted oddball in “Benny & Joon,” keeper of a retarded brother in “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” and the un-sinkable cross-dressing director in “Ed Wood.” Nobody plays human frailty like Depp. Even though he made women swoon in “Don Juan DeMarco,” he played the fabled lover as a committed loon.

His new films are John Badham’s “Nick of Time,” in which he plays an accountant turned assassin, and “Dead Man,” an eerie Jim Jarmusch Western that is scheduled for release later this year. Even after opting for “Dead Man” over the slick epic “Mobsters,” a choice that cost him millions of dollars, he was criticized when he signed to star in Badham’s thriller. Industry watchers thought he was doing “the Keanu thing,” forgoing his traditional quirky roles for a commercial blockbuster. But for Depp, “Nick of Time” is no typical action flick. It’s one of the first films since Hitchcock’s “Rope” to tell its tale in real time, each screen minute equaling 60 seconds of his character’s strife. And it’s his task in the film to gun down a female governor. Still, thriller is as thriller seems, and if the film is a hit, Depp will probably be charged with cynicism.

That’s one crime he has not committed. Drug use and hotel abuse, perhaps, but not calculation. Which may be why Depp made the difficult transition from teen hunk on TV’s “21 Jump Street” eight years ago to film star. Along the way, he has escaped the trivia heap by making brave, eccentric movie choices. Imagine David Cassidy as Gilbert Grape. Picture Kirk Cameron as an assassin. Or better yet, consider Richard Grieco, Depp’s megacool “Jump Street” co-star, as a name anyone would recognize.

Depp can be equally defined by the roles he didn’t take. He reportedly spurned Keanu Reeves’ part in “Speed,” Brad Pitt’s role in “Legends of the Fall” and Lestat in “Interview With the Vampire.” Of course, Tom Cruise played Lestat—a neat twist, because Cruise is said to have refused the role of Edward Scissorhands because Edward, while cutting edge, wasn’t handsome.

Depp says he respects Cruise but has no interest in “the Tom Cruise thing”—box office godhood. He can now command $4 million per film but often takes far less for pet projects, including his friend Jarmusch’s “Dead Man.”

He has danced to his own drummer since his 1984 debut in “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” in which he got sucked through a bed into hell. Along the way he has fallen for some of America’s most desirable women. He has had offscreen relationships with Jennifer Grey (“Dirty Dancing”) and Sherilyn Fenn (“Twin Peaks”). A rumored liaison—public, if not pubic—with Madonna was followed by a notorious engagement to Winona Ryder and the requisite tattoo, “Winona Forever.” When they broke up, he had the tattoo removed a letter at a time; at one point it read “Wino Forever.”

Today he and his latest love, übermodel Kate Moss, are the prom king and queen of young Hollywood—beautiful, thin chain-smokers with an air of sex and tragedy. Or call them, thanks to their morbid humor, the new Gomez and Morticia. Johnny once made a shrine in his movie-set trailer, placing candles around a photo of Kate with a bride of Frankenstein hairdo.

Their hangout, the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard, which Johnny co-owns, was the scene of River Phoenix’ fatal overdose in October 1993. The horror of that Halloween has faded, and today’s Viper Room more than ever resembles its owners: notorious and nice. “It’s a fun place again,” he says, passing the strip of cement where Phoenix died, “but you never forget.”

Depp is all about his past. In 1970, when he was seven years old, his family left Kentucky for Miramar, Florida, where the Depps moved from house to house and sometimes lived in motels. Depp’s father took off when Johnny was 15. His mother, Betty Sue, worked as a waitress, and Johnny counted her tips after work. He also developed a fierce devotion to society’s outcasts.

In high school he was suspended for mooning a teacher. Shortly after that he dropped out and worked pumping gas. Once, trying to learn to breathe fire like circus performers, he blew a mouthful of gasoline at a flame. His eyes lit up as the blaze raced toward him—then his eyebrows and hair lit up, too. He barely escaped.

To “get an identity” (and meet girls) he joined a band. He played guitar with the Kids, a group that was good enough to open for the Ramones, the Talking Heads, Iggy Pop and the B-52s. They went to Los Angeles to make it in the big time but flopped instead. Depp needed work. That’s when Nicolas Cage, a pal from the music scene, said, “You should meet my agent.”

Depp auditioned for director Wes Craven. Legend has it Craven’s daughter, with whom Depp ran lines that day, fell in love with the new kid in town. He won a role in Craven’s “Elm Street,” which led to “Private Resort,” a 1985 teen sexploitation pic in which his bare butt played second banana to then-unknown Rob Morrow. Next came stardom.

As a narc on “21 Jump Street,” Fox TV’s first hit, Depp became a poster boy to female teen America. He hated every minute of it. As soon as he was free of his contract, he spat on his “Jump Street” image by starring in John Waters’ spoof “Cry-Baby.”

The grungy offscreen Depp is fascinated by the macabre. He is a student of the nether zones of biology and the extremes of abnormal psychology. (He recently bought Bela Lugosi’s old house for $2.3 million.) He collects skeletons, paintings of scary clowns and, as mentioned, bugs. As with his work, there is a twitchy humor to his collectibles, his conversation, even his arrests. They’re all funny if you view them as he does—as brief excursions on our common march to the graveyard. In 1994 he was jailed for trashing a $1,200-a-night suite in New York City’s Mark Hotel. Handcuffed and led by police to a sidewalk jammed with reporters demanding his reaction, he nodded toward the cops and said, “I’ve met some really nice people.”

Is Depp a nice person? We decided to send Contributing Editor
Kevin Cook
to find out. His report:

“Johnny Depp often runs late. To him, a watch would be a handcuff. So I was pleased when he showed up less than an hour after the time we had arranged. He shook my hand and apologized, saying he had run his motorcycle into a pink Ford Escort.

“He led me into the quiet, dark Viper Room—black walls, mirrors, black upholstered booths. The booths are marked with brass plaques engraved with the names of preferred guests and a warning to interlopers: “Don’t Fuck With It.” The place was empty in the early afternoon. We went downstairs to Depp’s sanctum, where we sat on a couch near a closed-circuit TV that monitors the club above. We talked all day. I was impressed by his intelligence and earnestness. He was often tongue-tied, struggling to shoehorn his convoluted thoughts into sentences. Watching him grope for words, I couldn’t help rooting for him to unearth the mots justes he was trying for.

“A minor point: Depp’s Viper Room co-owner, Chuck E. Weiss, who happens to be the eponym of Rickie Lee Jones’ song ‘Chuck E’s in Love,’ has joked that Johnny is such an artistic, sensitive person that he ‘sits on the toilet and pees like a woman.’ But it’s not so. We did about a minute of this interview in their club’s men’s room, and I can assure you he’s a stand-up guy.”

Playboy:
You have only one urinal. Does the Viper Room men’s room get crowded on weekends?

Depp:
[
Nods
] It used to get wet. There was a guy who would somehow sneak in here with a monkey wrench. He would loosen a nut on the urinal so that when the next person flushed, water would go everywhere. It was like Niagara Falls. You had people running from the bathroom, slipping, security guys sprinting over to throw down towels. This happened fairly regularly for weeks, and I came to respect the toilet guy. I liked his method, his consistency. He clearly took pride in toilet sabotage. But then it stopped, and I kind of miss him.

Playboy:
Why do you call the place the Viper Room?

Depp:
After a group of musicians in the Thirties who called themselves Vipers. They were reefer heads and they helped start modern music. [
Lights a cigarette
] You know one great thing about having your own club? You get free matches.

Playboy:
Do you have any plans to quit smoking?

Depp:
Nah. I think if you find something you’re good at, you should stick with it. I have switched to lights, though. It got to where I would wheeze going up a flight of stairs, so I went to diet cigarettes.

Playboy:
You’ve been accused of selling out—“doing the Keanu thing,” as one critic said—for making
Nick of Time
.

Depp:
Who cares? I’m interested in story and character and doing things that haven’t been done a zillion times. When I read
Nick of Time
I could see the guy mowing the grass, watering his lawn, putting out the Water Wiggle in the backyard for his kid, and I liked the challenge of playing him. He’s nothing like me. And I wanted to work with John Badham because he made
Saturday Night Fever
and invented some interesting ways of shooting.
Nick of Time
is a thriller, and it gives me a chance to play a straight, normal, suit-and-tie guy.

Playboy:
If you wanted big money you could have also made
Mobsters
, a potential hit. You’ve turned down other mainstream films for movies such as
Dead Man
. How much did that one pay?

Depp:
Less than my expenses during the shoot. But it’s a poetic film. I did
Dead Man
so I could work with Jim Jarmusch. I trust Jim as a director and a friend and a genius.

Playboy:
How do you see your career? Is it something you’re sculpting as you go along, a body of work?

Depp:
It’s more primitive. I look at the story and the character and say, “Can I add any ingredients to make a nice soup?” In some sense there is a monofilament running through the guys I’ve played. They are outsiders. They’re people society says aren’t normal, and I think you have to stand up for people like that. But I didn’t plan it. It’s not like I had to play them. Except for Don Juan, I had to play that guy, and Edward Scissorhands. I loved Edward. He was total honesty. Honesty is what matters, and I have an absurd fascination with it, whether it means being true to your girl, your work or yourself.

Playboy:
You weren’t on the list for
Scissorhands
until Tim Burton met you and was won over. Did he ever say what he detected in the former star of
21 Jump Street
?

Depp:
Tim isn’t the type to verbalize it, but in snippets of conversations he has said it had to do with my eyes. My eyes looked like I carried more years than I had lived. He also felt my looks were deceptive, because I wasn’t what people thought.

Playboy:
What was that?

Depp:
Oh, whatever catchphrase they sew onto your back.

Playboy:
Heartthrob?

Depp:
Yeah. Or confident actor.

Playboy:
Are you a method actor? Are you in character between takes?

Depp:
No, and I don’t buy it when a guy says, “You must call me Henry the Eighth. Even when I go get a Dr. Pepper I am Henry the Eighth!” I can’t see that. If you’re truly in character it becomes unconscious. If you realize you’re in character or say you are, then you’re fucked. It means that you’re satisfied, and that’s the worst.

Playboy:
Your eccentric films make people wonder if you’re allergic to box office success. Aren’t you tempted to make one big score, one
Batman
, to bankroll your pet projects?

Depp:
That demon has visited me. He’s my best pal. He says, “Look, make two movies that are obvious commercial vehicles, blockbusters, and you’ll have the freedom to do smaller independent or experimental films. You can build an audience and bring it into that new world—open some minds.” I’ve thought that, but I don’t believe it. I would feel untrue to myself, untrue to the people who appreciate the choices I’ve made. For me the career thing has to be a little purer, more organic.

Playboy:
And you are happy with your choices?

Depp:
Maybe I was trying to do movies for good reasons—to make something I believed in—but I never thought of them as small, eccentric films. To me,
Ed Wood
wasn’t a small film even if it ultimately made ten dollars.

Playboy:
You were shooting
Divine Rapture
, an unusual film co-starring Marlon Brando, when financing collapsed, production stopped and everyone was sent home.

Depp:
That sucked. One minute we’re filming, the next minute there’s no money. It was like being in the middle of sex, right at the peak, and a guy walks in with a gun: “Stop it now.” That’s when you feel shitty, because you remember it’s the movie business, based on money.

Playboy:
Brando used to say he was so disgusted with the business that he didn’t care anymore, he just wanted the money.

Depp:
If he could do that, I applaud it. If I could do a bunch of movies and make zillions of dollars and not care, why not? I just can’t do it now. It’s probably ridiculous the way I talk about honesty and shit when really, what am I being true to? Some company. A bunch of guys who invest in a movie. They buy the product and distribute it. That’s not so pure. It’s art and commerce, oil and water, and here I am in some sort of artistic frenzy. Maybe I’m just very naive. Twenty minutes from now I’ll probably say fuck it and sell out completely.