Johnny goes off Depp end

THIS is why you don’t hire one of the most high-powered publicists in Hollywood and then sideline them. In a bonkers Rolling Stone interview with

Johnny Depp — which was arranged by his attorney, Adam Waldman, apparently in an attempt to vindicate Depp amid his lawsuit with his former financial managers — the author notes that “Waldman made it clear he was doing an end-run without the involvement of

Robin Baum, Depp’s formidable publicist of many years.” That might have been a bad call. Instead of a carefully orchestrated interview — perhaps at Baum’s office — Rolling Stone journalist Stephen Rodrick ended up hanging at Depp’s London home, while Depp sat with “two equal piles of tobacco and hash” rolling joints and pontificating until the sun came up.

The result were gems such as Depp’s observation that his battle with the managers is “the f - - king ‘Matrix.’ I didn’t see the movie, and I didn’t understand the script, but here’s what it is.”

When Rodrick puts to Depp the claim that he paid a sound engineer to feed him lines through an earpiece on a movie set because he couldn’t remember the script, according to the article, “Depp does not deny [this], saying the sounds fed to him made him act with just his eyes.”

And to the managers’ accusations that Depp’s spending was out of control and that he spent $30,000 on wine, Depp said, “It’s insulting to say that I spent $30,000 on wine . . . because it was far more.”

In the same vein, he shot down their claim that he spent $3 million shooting pal Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes from a cannon.

“By the way, it was not $3 million to shoot Hunter into the f - - king sky . . . It was $5 million.”

He also explained that “the cost of the rocket launch increased when he decided he wanted Thompson’s arc to be at least 1-foot higher than the Statue of Liberty’s 151-foot height.”