Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

The star who came in from the cold
For years the eccentric outsider, Johnny Depp has become Hollywood's favourite son. Martyn Palmer went to meet him

Johnny Depp has a style that is all his own. His look for today blends equal parts of Keith Richards and Errol Flynn -chic rebel grunge. Then there are the tattoos: "Jack", the name of his son, is emblazoned across his right forearm; "Lily Rose", his daughter, is on the other. Lower down the arms come an assortment of coloured bangles, beads and studded leather straps. There's a embroidered white silk shirt and golden brown pantaloons.

When he smiles, he flashes gold-capped teeth and his hair, though piled up beneath a grey beret, is long and braided. With the moustache and pointy beard, he has a rakish, devilish air. Most men dressed like this would look daft. Depp just looks cool.

Paradoxically, this is precisely because he never shies away from ridicule just the opposite. His most memorable screen roles have been as oddballs and weirdos (Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Ichabod Crane), and while Hollywood keeps encouraging him to play his trump card -the way he looks -Depp has consistently refused, preferring to disguise himself and do his very best to make us forget that it's oh-so-pretty Johnny Boy up there on screen. It's as though he were a character actor trapped in a leading man's body.

In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, his fourth, hugely enjoyable collaboration with the director Tim Burton, his Willy Wonka is pasty-faced with a bob, perfect white teeth, skin-tight purple gloves, a cane and an array of frock-coats.

Knowing that Depp based his Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean on Keith Richards, it's tempting to see echoes of Michael Jackson here. This is Wonka as a troubled loner, an eccentric who has turned his back on the outside world and finds it uncomfortable now that he has invited it in.

"Michael Jackson never crossed my mind," he demurs. "I guess I can understand the comparison. But you could just as easily think of some kind of recluse, like Howard Hughes."

Felicity Dahl, the widow of the original book's author, Roald, told the director after a private screening that she loved the film, singling out Depp for special praise. Such compliments don't come easily. Her husband was so furious with the saccharine 1971 adaptation of his book that he refused to grant the film rights for its sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. Since Dahl's death, his family has guarded his work and reputation with similar ferocity.

We are in the Bahamas, in a resort jam-packed with holidaying Americans, where Depp is making two sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean. He can't get away from filming to promote Charlie, so selected journalists from around the world have been flown in to meet him. "I thought you might like it," he says, deadpan, when I express enthusiasm after a preview of the film. "I did it all for you ..."

Once, flying all this way would have been a highly risky undertaking on the journalists' part. Depp, in his earlier days, was not exactly Mr Reliable. The boy who grew up wanting to be a guitarist was living the rock'n'roll lifestyle to the full -drinking far too much, trashing hotel rooms, snarling at paparazzi. The tabloids loved it. Deep down, Depp hated it.

It was during this period, in 1998, that I was first invited to meet him at the Cannes Film Festival. Along with several other journalists, I traipsed out to a hotel 20 miles outside Cannes, where Depp was waiting to fulfil his promotional duties for Terry Gilliam's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

The only thing was that Depp wasn't out of bed. He and his then girlfriend, Kate Moss, had been partying the night before and hadn't yet surfaced. After waiting four hours, we were informed that Johnny was "unwell", and invited to return the next day, when a monosyllabic Depp answered questions as though he would rather be hugging 'gators in Florida, where he spent much of his childhood.

Depp subsequently admitted to me that he had been drinking far too much as he grappled with the distortion created in his life by celebrity.

"When you are doing that to yourself, self-medicating, it is to avoid feeling," he says. "There is a degree of me, me, me that you can't escape."

Part of the cause of the effect was that Depp didn't want to play the game. He didn't want to become a poster boy -the roles he has chosen reflect that. He came out of the cop show 21 Jump Street with Hollywood ready to give him a shot but on their terms, as the latest heart-throb.

Instead, he held out for a role that would test him. The cult film-maker John Waters was the first to take a chance on him, with Cry-Baby, and then Burton, with the magnificent Edward Scissorhands. "John went out on a limb for me with Cry-Baby," Depp says. "And Tim's risk was quite a bit higher, and that's something I will never forget.