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Washington Post - 1995

Los Angeles
Johnny Depp is giving a guided tour of his tattoos. He lightly strokes his most recent one, a trio of rectangular boxes on his left finger. "I used to doodle these when I was on the telephone," he says. Then he holds up his other hand, where the number 3 resides between thumb and index finger. "I like the number 3," he says, as if this explains anything.

Up goes a sleeve, revealing a sprawling, red and blue "Betty Sue." His mom. Down comes a punctured leather boot to reveal an inner ankle punctuated by a large question mark and an X. I got this three or four years ago." He declines to display his famed "Wino Forever," the truncated remains of his relationship with actress Winona Ryder, and a few others. He also declines to explain the stories behind any of them.

"To me it's like some journal--they all represent different times in my life," he says. "If you see them, that's one thing--but if I explain them to you, that would be like walking you through my journal." He wouldn't want to do that. He's already revealed more than he'd planned.

Even with eight tattoos, Depp is no simple read. The 32-year-old actor even plays weird, outcast characters in equally weird, offbeat movies--a boy with scissors for hands in "Edward Scissorhands," a young man trapped by family responsibilities in What's Eating Gilbert Grape?," a cross-dressing movie director in "Ed Wood," and then, of course, the delightfully deluded Don Juan in "Don Juan DeMarco"--playing them with a raw simplicity and unembellished honesty that has won him critical acclaim, if not wild box office success. He does the same in his latest film, a thriller by John Badham called "Nick of Time," in which he plays a terrorized father who must kill the California governor to save the life of his kidnapped daughter.

And yet in real life Depp appears to be incredibly, impossibly in, wearing earrings, a knit cap and super-model girlfriend Kate Moss to all the right places, hanging out at his bar in West Hollywood, the Viper Room, where River Phoenix died of an overdose. Playing guitar in a rock band. Trashing a hotel room in a fit of anger. And then, there are all those tattoos.

Who is Johnny Depp? The sensitive, rather shy, thinking man's actor? Or the rock-and-roll adolescent of Hollywood's A-list who gets his demons out on the furniture?

Depp things for a moment, pulling on a cigarette. "I'm a combination platter of all those things," he says. "I was a kid who dropped out of high school, who got his first tattoo at 17, who played rock-and-roll. That was just the chain of events." He stops. He mentions his drinking. He thinks about a lot of things he doesn't want to mention. Then he says: They say everything is okay in moderation. Some people can do that. I've never been able to do things in moderation."

WEIRD AND SAFE
People who know Johnny Depp invariably use the same words to describe him: sincere, compassionate, honest, decent, real.

John Badham sought Depp out for "Nick of Time," a movie with lots of Hitchcockian overtones, for those qualities. "If Hitchcock were making this picture he's probably have wanted Jimmy Stewart," says the director. "Who's the Jimmy Stewart of the '90s? Nice, unassuming, unpretentious? Johnny has a basic sweetness to him. He's a classic movie actor, like the true greats--Paul Newman, Gary Cooper, even Steve McQueen. Minimalist in approach, but extremely honest. Johnny is that kind of actor. He has this great ability to be in a scene where he may do nothing and yet he establishes his presence on the screen."

As Edward Scissorhands, a role that Depp feels is among the closest to his own personality, the actor projects a bewildered sort of innocence from behind his kewpie-monster makeup and menacing prosthetics. As Gilbert Grape, another role he cites as close to him, Depp is a regular guy stuck in Smallsville, U.S.A., "going nowhere," as his mentally retarded 18-year-old brother endlessly reminds him. When he meets a girl who holds out the possibility of love, adventure and change, Gilbert balks. "I've gotta go," he mumbles and turns to flee, conveying in that brief moment the terror of facing his own loneliness.

Depp's latest film is being called a departure from those sorts of roles, since it's a big-budget thriller. In "Nick of Time" he plays Gene Watson, a young professional whose 6-year-old daughter is kidnapped by the nasty Mr. Smith (Christopher Walken) as they step off an Amtrak train in Los Angeles, Smith threatens to kill Watson's daughter in 90 minutes if he does not assassinate the governor within that time. But even in this film, as he races through the Bonaventure hotel in panic and torment, Depp plays the victimized Everyman to Walken's malevolent manipulator.

Still, why did he choose such a--well, an easy role after playing such unconventional characters? "I liked the script," Depp sys. "I thought it was a good time to make a change. I figured I'd do something else after being accused by everybody of playing weirdos. It was an opportunity to play the straight man. It's really a challenge to do that--you've got to keep the guy interesting. It's tougher. Ed Wood, for me, was a breeze. We had a god time--Martin Landau (as Bela Lugosi) and I out there doing weird things. I felt at home--there's a safety in not being yourself."

There's also a safety in playing yourself on screen rather than in real life. Depp goes back to Edward Scissorhands--that's the person he'd like to be. "You know, on the last day of filming of 'Edward Scissorhands,' I looked at the mirror and I felt really sad. I must have done that makeup 90 times, and I thought, 'I'm never going to see this guy again.' There was a weird safety in being so open--in being nonjudgmental, not cynical. There was a freedom in that. I'd love to have that openness, to be that innocent," he says. "When you're a kid you have that innocence. But it gets beat down, beat up."

A triangle of sunlight falls across Depp's forehead and the brown locks that fringe his eyes. His beauty is sculpted, delicate--almost girlish--with cheekbones that curve down toward the two small hollows beside his mouth. He has an earnestness that seems youthful; his eyes glance downward, and he smiles only rarely. He murmurs a lot, instead of speaking outright. He's deferential and polite, offering to server everyone in the hotel suite something to drink, rather than asking an assistant to bring him a Coke.

Otherwise--despite the makeup that's been freshly applied (he's just come from a television interview and will be posing for photos shortly)--Depp looks as if he's just rolled out of bed and is ready to work in a garage. He wears a rumpled white T-shirt under a denim shirt, navy-blue cords and battered work boots, one of which he's propped on the coffee table. He has a sparse, week-old growth on his face--neither a goatee nor a beard, he explains, just laziness--three small silver hoops in his right ear, a single hoop in his left and a couple of heavy silver rings on his fingers. He chain-smokes American Spirit cigarettes--chemical-free, thus in his logic healthier--and plays with a pair of aviator sunglasses.

So what have we here: Sweetness and light? Or overpaid anomie? Apparently both. Last year, Depp was officially listed with the bad boys when he busted up some furniture in his room at the Mark hotel in New York. Depp was arrested, and the media has hounded him about it ever since. Even now, Interview magazine has him on its latest cover as "dashing, hotel room-smashing Johnny Depp." Is this just a way to label him Depp, who spends most of his life in hotel rooms, thinks so. He has insisted repeatedly that it was an isolated incident, that he'd had a bad day and that the hotel security man was overzealous. The cops released him; he paid the bill: $9,767.12.

Whatever the case, Depp is sick of justifying himself. "I think I'm going to make a career out of smashing hotel rooms," he says. "When I fill out my customs forms, under occupation I'm going to write 'actor, hotel room-smasher.'"

But it's true that Depp has a temper; he was arrested for assaulting a security guard in Canada in 1989. He can get testy when bumped the wrong way by a stranger. He admits to having abused drugs, though he says he's cleaned up his act.

"It starts in your teens--getting loaded when it's recreational. Then at a certain point you're getting loaded and it's not recreational anymore, it's to escape reality," he says. "I don't believe I was an alcoholic, but I was--uh, I, uh"--he exhales smoke while he considers this--"I was pretty good at it. And it's not easy to quit. But I've stopped doing everything pretty much.

"I feel more calm these days, more even," he says. "Although I do have my moments." He decides to address the hotel thing, what the hell. "If you have an emotion--a demon--if you're feeling it, what's the right thing to do? Hold it in, or let it go? When I do it on the screen, that's my job. If I do it in a hotel room, I'm a freak."

STUMBLING INTO STARDOM
Sal Jenco knows Johnny Depp better than just about anybody in the world. They have been friends since they were 9-year-olds in Miramar, Fla.--a working-class town wedged between Miami and the Everglades where Depp's father was a public works official--both obsessed with the only thing that matters to a lot of adolescent boys: rock-and-roll. They listened to Elvis Costello and the Clash for hours, they cut class, they tore up the town. Jenco, who finished high school, left home at 16 to sleep in cars and under bridges and, as he puts it, "be free." Depp, who dropped out at 15, was playing guitar in clubs until 4 a.m. and couldn't be bothered to go to school. Music was all there was.

Today, Jenco runs the Viper Room, the club he bought with Depp in 1993 that quickly became a magnet for the young, hip West Hollywood set. Jenco ells the bartenders to treat every client as if he had a broken heart. The two friends also play in a band--along with Gibby Haynes and Bill Carter--called P, which just released its first album.

Jenco doesn't talk much. Particularly to journalists. But he really, really loves Johnny Depp, so he makes an effort. "There are people who are driven--their motive to succeed is to have some form of attention and have people blow sunshine up their [unprintable]. And there are those who are interested in art, to contributing to being an artist, to having respect for themselves and the art they're participating in. That's what he does."

He goes on: "Johnny Depp is not affected in any way, shape or form by Hollywood or the social conditioning of Hollywood and the entertainment business. I know him well. He could be pumping gas or in the top-grossing film of the '90s--he's the same guy."

This seems pretty hard to believe. Nobody just stumbles into stardom; there are too many people trying to shove their way in. And yet Depp gives the impression of never having hungered for fame, and not even having hungered to act. Music was his passion. Acting happened later.

At 20, Depp moved to Los Angeles with his guitar, his band (the Kids) and his wife (Lori Anne Allison, whom he married and divorced within a year). His wife's ex-boyfriend, Nicolas Cage, helped him get his first acting job in the horror film, "A Nightmare on Elm Street" in 1984. Depp played a kid who gets swallowed by a bed and then spewed, as a geyser of blood, at the ceiling. After that he landed small parts in "Private Resort" and even "Platoon," but he didn't attract any real attention until he took the role of an undercover high school narc on Fox's hit TV series "21 Jump Street" in 1987.

Depp now dismisses the series as "that show," but it made him a star, at least among teenage girls. Depp, however, didn't want to be a teen idol, and left after his contract expired in 1989. The next year he made "Cry-Baby" with John Waters, a camp musical of '50s clichés that succeeded in changing his image, and shortly after made "Edward Scissorhands" with Tim Burton, the movie that established his name and grossed Twentieth Century Fox $54 million.

Since then Depp has been sought for leading roles in blockbusters such as "Speed" and "Interview with the Vampire," but he has chosen instead to make one unusual film after another: "Benny and Joon," a schizophrenic love story, and "Gilbert Grape" in 1993; "Ed Wood" in 1994: "Arizona Dream," a surreal reverie by Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica released on video, and "Don Juan DeMarco" in 1995. After "Nick of Time" he starred in "Dead Man, a black-and-white western directed by Jim Jarmusch that will be released next spring.

This winter Depp will shoot "Donnie Brasco," a mob movie in which he stars with Al Pacino, and sometime next year he hopes to direct his own project, "The Brave," about a man who is given the chance to rescue his family from poverty by doing a snuff film.

"He is definitely not interested in commercial success," says John Badham. "...Being a movie star is not a be-all, end-all--doing interesting parts is important to him."

COOLNESS
It's the premiere of "Nick of Time" at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, and the city's social elite has turned out more for the charity--it's a benefit for the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center--than for the film.

Johnny Depp, Movie Star, doesn't care either way. He steps out of a limousine the length of a Winnebago, not with Kate Moss but with Betty Sue, who is all smiles and gleaming in black velvet. Depp wears a tux with an open-necked shirt and black platform oxfords, cocking his head at the barrage of television cameras and clutching his mother's hand. He walks the gantlet--"Entertainment Tonight," "Good Morning America," "Inside Edition"--giving the same 30-second interview about six times. Johnny, why did you play such a conventional role? He scuffs at the floor, scratches his ear and near-whispers into each microphone, "Y'know. To me it was a good story. Mr. Badham is such a talented director..." Mr. Badham? He's putting them on.

"Well, he admits the next day, "that whole thing is so weird. I'll never get used to it. It just feels so artificial--this wall of smiling people, asking questions they don't care to know the answers to, with you obliged to answer as best you can. It's always weird."

The truth is, Johnny Depp is a natural star. There is no way around this conclusion: He's just cool. Ineffably and effortlessly cool. Eight tattoos or none, wild man or Everyman, he will keep us guessing at his true nature as long as he dares to offer up his soul on screen. That takes courage. And that is cool."

"He is very generous with his spirit," his best buddy Sal Jenco says in admiration. "I'll tell you one thing. He was always cool."