Return to Interview page

Rendez-vous magazine, November 2003

Rendez-vous with Johnny Depp

Johnny Depp has played a boy with scissors for hands, an eccentric B-movie director and a law clerk. Now he is a pirate in Disney’s latest movie. Arnaud Malherbe, a journalist at L'express, sketched this portrait of the magnificent, slightly wacky American actor.

With his round eyes, syncopated stride and wet hair, nobody looks more like a scared rabbit caught in a car's headlights than Johnny Depp. Today the 40-year-old actor is wearing a cocked hat, golden earrings and kohl for his new role in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean and literally magnetized the screen.

Through his choice of risky parts and disconcerting characters, Depp has established a reputation for weirdness. After an aborted rock career, the young Kentucky native ended up in the movies by accident appearing in Wed Craven's Nightmare on Elm Street. Then he appeared on posters for teenagers bedrooms after starring on the TV show 21 Jump Street. Emir Kusturica rescued him from the teen idol image in Arizona Dreams and his career took off for good.

A fan of Buster Keaton, absinth, painting and black poetry, he looks for down and out or magnificently loony characters including a boy with scissors for hands (Edward Scissorhands) an eccentric journalist (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) a lawyers clerk and legendary cowboy (Dead Man), a visionary but somewhat mad director (Ed Wood), and an opium- addicted detective (From Hell). He always seems to be playing that crazy rabbit.

Depp’s movie family is made up of similar slightly cracked dreamers and dads, including Terry Gilliam, Jim Jarmusch, Emir Kusturica and Tim Burton. His relationships with those filmmakers are so stifling that he has only directed one movie, The Brave (1997), which collapses beneath the weight of borrowings from their work.

Still Johnny is happy: the actor has found the right balance. He despises George Bush and lives on a farm in southern France with Vanessa Paradis and their children Lily-Rose(age 4) and Jack( age 1). They are the ones for whom the rabbit agreed to dress up as a pirate. Not Disney.

(Transcriber’s note: there were some pictures along with this article; however they were not new…just some pictures from Pirates of the Caribbean.)