Depp doesn’t make sense as Grindelwald
Movie franchise unlikely to benefit from actor’s on-screen weirdness or off-screen antics
The most interesting thing about Johnny Depp’s performance in the new Fantastic Beasts film — arguably the only interesting thing — is that he is actually there to give it in the first place.
Two years ago, audiences who saw the first instalment in J.K. Rowling’s fantasy series were given a surprise just before the closing credits, when the villain of the piece — a scheming magical enforcer called Percival Graves, played by Colin Farrell — unexpectedly morphed into a platinum-haired and pudgy-faced Depp.
The actor’s cameo appearance as Gellert Grindelwald, public enemy No. 1 in the Wizarding World, had been kept secret, but for many of us, the surprise went off with less of a bang than a plop.
Farrell had made a suave and mysterious baddie — the kind whose path through the next four proposed films might make all sorts of intriguing turns.
But now the prospect of eight to 10 hours of Depp’s trademark oddball shtick loomed instead. What’s more, six months earlier, Depp had been accused of domestic abuse by his now-ex wife, actress Amber Heard, which he has strenuously denied.
There had also been whispers of unpredictable behaviour on the set of the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film — later extensively fleshed out by crew members — that suggested the now 55-yearold actor’s craft was not as laser-focused as it might have been.
Even at that relatively late stage in mid-2016, Depp could have been easily and quietly Kevin Spaceyed out of the picture. Nothing about the role of Grindelwald, a proto-fascist agitator whipping up anti-Muggle sentiment in the 1930s, suggested Depp was the only man who could play him.
Also, no one knew he was actually in it. In a statement, Rowling admitted she and director David Yates had discussed recasting, but said that based on their understanding of the circumstances, they were “not only comfortable sticking with our original casting, but genuinely happy to have Johnny playing a major character in the movies,” before adding, a little spikily, that “conscience isn’t governable by committee.”
To a critic who has spent the past eight years watching Depp floundering professionally, while his PR liability rating creeps ever higher — well, that seems like an odd call.
There is no mystery around why Depp should want to secure another prominent, and therefore well-paid, recurring role. A legal spat with his former business managers last year shed light on a lavish lifestyle that reportedly cost the actor an average of $2 million per month, including a wine tab of $30,000 and a lump-sum payment to fire his late friend Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes into space from a cannon.
So what else has the present decade yielded? Halfformed vanity projects (The Rum Diary), wacko-goth diminishing returns (Dark Shadows, Alice Through the Looking Glass), glorified cameos (Into the Woods, Lucky Them), corny throwbacks (The Tourist) and outright abominations (Mortdecai). There were also two notable box office bombs, The Lone Ranger and Transcendence, both heavily marketed on Depp’s involvement.
Next came an attempt to move back onto the Oscars’ radar with the 2015 truecrime saga Black Mass. But his lead performance as Boston gangster Whitey Bulger was buried under unconvincing and unnecessary prosthetics that left Depp looking as if he was trying to act though a chapati.
Then there was to be a remake of The Invisible Man, part of a proposed Dark Universe of films at Universal. But after a Tom Cruise-led version of The Mummy failed to excite audiences last summer, the Dark Universe was quietly snuffed out. Another truecrime thriller, City of Lies, in which Depp plays a detective investigating the 1997 murder of hip-hop star Biggie Smalls, was supposed to be released in September. But it was pulled from schedules and remains in limbo after the film’s location manager filed a lawsuit alleging Depp had physically assaulted him on set, which Depp denies.
Somehow, Rowling and Warner Bros have reconciled all of the above with making Depp a linchpin of their very expensive new venture.
Perhaps there is also a hope that Depp has one more iconic performance in him, the same hope Francis Ford Coppola had when he cast Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now amid much discussion about his capability.
The tragedy of Brando is that his self-sabotage succeeded, and after Apocalypse Now there was nothing left of him to watch. As for Depp, it seems unlikely he is about to give the world his Colonel Kurtz in episodes two to five of something called Fantastic Beasts. But perhaps he will discover a corner of his jungle that remains unscorched.