From Hell
Actor Johnny Depp
It wasn't long ago that Johnny Depp was pigeonholed as just another pretty face: a teen idol without the depth and talent of peers like Nicolas Cage or Sean Penn, and with a decidedly eccentric taste in movie roles. But Depp steered his own course and grew into an actor's actor. You'd have to look back to the 1970s — to Al Pacino or James Caan — to find an actor remotely like him, one who continually takes creative chances while maintaining a bankable marquee name.
"It's not that I shy away from commercial type projects," Johnny Depp explains in Los Angeles, "It's just that I think being a movie star would get in the way of being an actor. My favorite actors have always been character actors and it's more interesting — and more fun maybe — to at least try and play characters."
The iconoclastic performer has carved out one of Hollywood's most enviable and creatively-rewarding careers since he leapt from TV heartthrob on 21 Jump Street to leading man in the John Waters musical Cry Baby (1990). The subsequent decade found him moving easily from offbeat mainstream fare (Edward Scissorhands, Don Juan DeMarco) and oddball independent films (Arizona Dream, Dead Man).
So his appearance in the Hughes brothers' phantasmagoric period piece, From Hell (2001), as Inspector Abberline, a London police officer assigned to the infamous Jack the Ripper case, isn't surprising. Depp, who was already well-versed in the various Ripper theories, finds the one explored in From Hell (the title comes from the return address on a letter from the publicity-courting killer) to be "pretty shocking and pretty important in that world. I think it's a good one."
From Hell also finds this self-described fan of biographies again playing a real-life character, which he's done in films as diverse as Donnie Brasco and Ed Wood.
"I like playing real life characters," Depp explains, "and I like playing characters that you get to invent from the ground up. For instance, Ed Wood was a real guy, but there wasn't that much material on him — other than footage from his movies — to really be able to tell what he was like as a person. So I had to kind of make it up. When you play a real person, it's a whole lot more responsibility. Playing George Jung [in Blow] for instance, I felt a deep sense of responsibility. Playing Raoul Duke [Hunter S. Thompson's alter-ego in Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas], it was a really intense sense of responsibility because I was afraid Hunter would sneak up behind me and garrote me, attack me in some way."
It was another recent role, as a Rom (or gypsy) horseman involved with a Jewish singer in Nazi-occupied Paris, which strongly affected Depp, and demonstrates how his acting choices are inevitably connected to his natural curiosity.
"It's funny because doing The Man Who Cried," he says, "to me, the Rom paralleled the Native Americans. What happened ever since whitey stepped foot on the soil here, it's been that way for the gypsies over there. It was a great opportunity to meet a lot of those people and become friends and brothers. Each film for me, more than it is a career move or anything like that, it's an extended education. I take the opportunity to learn stuff and learn things from people."
The provocative Hughes brothers found a kindred spirit in the adventurous actor. Depp and Allen Hughes concocted a scene where Abberline mixes a potent absinthe and laudanum cocktail to further the character's hallucinogenic premonitory visions. The brothers also describe Depp's own mood enhancing technique: he wears a hidden earpiece while performing, with his own DJ spinning an eclectic range of music from Mozart to the South Park soundtrack, Miles Davis to Marvin Gaye.
It isn't just his unusual choices or methods which sets the 37-year-old apart from most Hollywood leading men, there's also an ocean: Depp went to France to film Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate in 1998, and never left. He now lives there with his family, French singer and actress Vanessa Paradis (The Girl on the Bridge) and their 2 1/2 year old daughter Lily. [Son Jack was born in 2002.] Johnny Depp appreciates the ability to retreat from the spotlight in America, and finds he has a particular affinity with the attitude of European performers.
"Every actor is different," he says, "every single one of us is different. We all have the reasons why we do what we do. But I would say, on just a general level, there are a whole lot of American actors who have this disease, the sort of 'me me me me me,' the publicity hounds. 'How much money can I make? How much more famous can I be?' And I find that much less in European actors. Their focus is on the work and not so much the result: what that work is going to do for them, how that's going to further them along. It's just a dedication to the work itself, and it's apparent when you see the result."
© 2001, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.