DOUBLE JOHNNY

by L. Messina

 

D la Repubblica delle Donne

25th September 2001

 

Translation by Aries

Drug smuggler or bloodhound chasing Jack the Ripper? The new Johnny Depp was born in two movies.

 

His fame is almost a disturbing cliché: the professional rebel. But if you happen to meet him, you find yourself vis-à-vis with the most delicate freak[1], an angel dressed half like an old hippie and half like a new rapper, with the gentle manners of a well-educated boy. As the director Mike Newell said, the kind of boy "you would like to introduce to your mother", and who doesn't want to be reminded any further of his past as hotel room-smasher ("I did it only once and I paid it dearly"). Today he confesses: "What counts most is the family". The "mystery Johnny Depp" is a mess with a big merit: he doesn't appear fake at all. It's impossible not to believe him when he says: "I don't disguise myself, I'm exactly like that." You hear it all the time from actors' lips and it's mostly a lie. But in Johnny Depp's case things are different, and his career testifies this struggle to remain authentic, without being swallowed up by Hollywood. A very hard task if you are, like Johnny, entrapped in the body of a movie star.

At 20 he was already an idol for teen-agers who adored him as the main character of the TV series 21 Jump street. With that charismatic glance, if he had chosen the mainstream cinema, he would have been able to compete and even to outclass actors of the same generation, like Tom Cruise. Instead, he dropped the TV series and chose as his first movie Cry Baby, directed by the most irreverent American film-maker, John Waters. Then he went on with Tim Burton (with whom he acted in three movies sharing his restlessness and weirdness), Gillian, Hallstrom, Kusturica, Polanski, a series of out of line directors who offered him difficult, dark and weird characters.

If you ask him if he will ever play a "normal" character, he looks at you with open-wide, surprised eyes, like a little child and answers: "Sort of boy meets girl, boy loses girl then meets another girl? There are many who can play it wonderfully, so why should I do it, too? I don't think I would be good at, and it would be deadly boring, I would get crazy". Much better to choose roles which he feels more alike: outcasts, losers, borderliners. "I'm able to express better the feelings of those who are a little outside. I don't consider myself an outsider, but neither completely integrated in the society. There are thing considered as completely normal which appears very strange to me, or vice versa. Tim (Burton) and I share this kind of sensitivity, this way of understanding or not understanding the world".

 

Complex outsiders are also the last two characters played by Johnny Depp. The protagonist of Blow, with Penelope Cruz, now open in Italy and of From Hell. In the first movie, directed by Ted Demme, Johnny Depp impersonates George Jung, the man who in the late 70s started the cocaine import in USA, became a millionaire, entered the Medellin cartel of Pablo Escobar and ended up in jail where he will remain until 2014. "I met him and spent a while with him, trying to steal part of his life, of his soul. After seeing the movie, he accused me to be a witch, because I have been able to absorb so much of his life in only two days. It was somehow a great compliment. It was very easy to represent him as an odious person, much more difficult was to show his humanity without judging him. He is essentially the victim of the classical American dream: get the most you can. That's what we've been taught."

 

In From Hell, instead, the Hughes brothers gave him the role of Inspector Abberline who, in a accurately rebuilt London of the late 19th Century, chases the first serial killer of the history, Jack the Ripper. And he manages to capture him, though with quite unconventional methods: his intuition and revealing dreams based on opium. "I like Abberline because he is not a traditional policeman. He has to deal with the case and face his own demons, the drug addiction. He tries to escape from his own fears."