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February 17, 2002 Sunday

Depp And Meaningful

BY: Philip Mccarthy

THE funny thing about Johnny Depp is that he's a sex symbol who hardly ever plays romantic leads. Off screen though, he has more than made up for it - until recently his life looked a lot like a soap opera, filled with supermodels and starlets including Winona Ryder and Kate Moss, over whom he got worked up enough to tattoo his bicep or trash a hotel room or open a bar.

That all changed in 1998 when he met the Parisian singer/actress and one-time face of Chanel, Vanessa Paradis. He picked up and moved to the Left Bank and is now the proud father of a two-year-old daughter, Lily-Rose. Today, on a quick jaunt home to America to promote his latest film From Hell, a dark and complex account of the gruesome London autumn when five Whitechapel prostitutes were carved up by a killer called the Ripper, Depp, 38, is positively pining for the wife and daughter he calls "my girls".

"When you are surrounded by all the beauty," he says, "it makes it difficult to leave home. But first you got to bring home the bacon." Then he adds in a sort of dreamily sentimental voice: "Who would have believed, a few years back, that I would be a happy Parisian dad and realise that it saved my life?"

Back then he was playing a succession of oddball loners and outsiders. Some of them, like his characters in Edward Scissorhands and Ed Wood, had pretty off-putting personal ticks that positioned him a long way from the matinee idol. Downers rarely do well and apart from Edward Scissorhands, and perhaps Donnie Brasco and Sleepy Hollow, there was too much angst in his movies for them to become hits. There was the time he played a Casanova-style character in Don Juan DeMarco, but that turned out to be a story about a delusional mental patient. Marlon Brando, of all people, played his shrink. And then there was last year's Chocolat, in which he played a gypsy with a weird Irish accent who wooed the free-spirited Juliette Binoche over meaningful glances and Guatemalan cocoa. But that was an exception.

Straight after Chocolat he did Before Night Falls, a barely-seen film in which he played two cameos; a drag queen with expansive smuggling skills and a military interrogator. That put paid to any agents fantasising about cashing in on his post-Chocolat charisma.

"There are a lot of people out there who are very good at the 'boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl again' stuff and good luck to them," says Depp. "Chocolat was fun but I'm not sure I'm particularly good at it. I'd probably be bored to tears if I had to do that sort of stuff all the time. The appeal of a film like From Hell for me is that it is pretty dark and I've always been interested in human behaviour."

In a stark contrast to the Depp of a few years ago, today's version is a picture of affability and charm. He's now a mid-Atlantic guy and the look is either Euro-chic or thrift-shop strange. He's wearing a felt fedora over his Dali-esque locks, a loosely buttoned tan shirt, well-worn jeans and lots of leather around the neck and wrists. There's a roll-up cigarette dangling from pouty lips.

It should look odd, but Johnny Depp's part-Cherokee cheekbones and brooding eyes can tame the most eccentric of ensembles.

In From Hell, Depp's particular gift to his Sherlock Holmes-style detective is not so much his dishevelled appearance as his glassy-eyed demeanour. Depp plays Fred Abberline, the permanantly stoned inspector whose regular head-clearing visits to the opium den fuel his hunt for the Ripper. "I liked the idea that Abberline was this very good detective, but that he also had his dark side," Depp says. "He was a bit of a junkie really. And those sort of drugs, opium and absinthe, were preferred means of self-medication of the era."

From Hell is based on Alan Moore's graphic novel. Filmed outside Prague, where the East End of London was recreated, it suggests the Ripper was a cover up for royal family shenanigans.

Another recent Depp film, last year's Blow, also dealt unflinchingly with drugs, a subject he is personally no stranger to.

He has this to say on the subject: "I tried drugs under the guise that it's just recreational. I tended to do it when I drank. And then the reality of it hits you; that you're trying to make yourself numb just to function. You're getting loaded just so you can talk to people. I decided long ago to quit, I just hadn't got around to practising it. But then my daughter came along and I just never wanted to go back there. Now I just sort of dabble in wine. I'm really boring."

How would he react if his daughter, in years to come, wanted to dabble? "Hopefully we'll be open and honest with each other so that she can come to me and I can tell her pretty much what they're about," he says. "If she comes to me in 15 or 20 years and says, 'Pop, I'm curious about marijuana' then I'd be able to say, 'Let experiment, let's investigate together.' I mean, I wouldn't want her to score a bag of weed on the street that's laced with PCP or something horrible."

He's an urbane parent and that's one of the things he likes about bringing up his daughter in Paris; the culture is a little more sophisticated and celebrities are usually accorded a little more privacy. Which, of course, is one of the ironies: now that he lives in a country a little more accepting of his eccentricities, he's too busy being dad to indulge them.