DEPP WALKS PLANK OF HIS OWN MAKING
Personal and professional problems scupper actor’s golden-boy status
When Disney unceremoniously dropped Johnny Depp from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise in December 2018, it saved itself an estimated $90 million to $100 million — their once-prized actor’s paycheque. By Disney’s reckoning, Depp failed to earn his keep in the most recent Pirates instalment, 2017’s underperforming Dead Men Tell No Tales.
Furthermore, Depp’s private life is a mess, say many reports. Those allegations of domestic abuse — courtesy of ex-wife Amber Heard — and his increasingly notorious lifestyle constitute an affront to the squeakyclean family image the Disney organization is embracing more zealously than ever.
Still, there’s something genuinely saddening about the spectacle of a gifted but idiosyncratic actor losing his way to the degree that Depp has. His mounting financial distress alone is a testament to his recklessness, given all those crazy expenditures — $75 million to purchase and decorate 14 homes, $18 million for a yacht, $300,000 a month to pay a personal staff of 40, $30,000 a month on wine, $3 million to shoot the ashes of gonzo buddy Hunter S. Thompson out of a cannon.
But here’s the irony. Is Pirates of the Caribbean ultimately to blame for what’s happened to him?
Disney, an obsessive recycler, struck gold when it decided to rework one of its most popular theme-park attractions for the big screen. But the movies were largely awful — incoherent, boring and clunky. Their saving grace was Johnny Depp’s outrageous, over-the-top portrayal of Captain Jack Sparrow.
It was the mascaraed presence of Captain Jack mincing his way through the debris of the writing that salvaged these generally deplorable movies and brought in the dollars. Yet the Disney people hated his portrayal to the very end.
Back in 2002, during shooting of the first film — Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl — senior studio brass were freaking out, convinced that Depp’s approach would bring disaster.
They loathed the fey body language, the eyeshadow, the chin braids — but Depp refused to budge, arguing the “integrity” of his character was at stake. He did compromise in agreeing to reduce Captain Jack’s gleaming display of gold teeth down to one.
Years later, when Depp was riding high and doing publicity for his fourth Captain Jack entry, he joked to Postmedia that he had done his best to get fired from the franchise at the very beginning — but “they just couldn’t bring themselves to do it.”
He also reflected on his sudden success. “It’s kind of interesting to experience that kind of ride after essentially 20 years of enjoying a career based on failure.”
Take note of the word “failure.” Until Captain Jack came along, Depp was scarcely box office gold. But he was always ready to take risks.
He would sign for quirky items projects such as Ed Wood, Don Juan DeMarco and Dead Man, and cheerfully predict that none would make any money — and he’d be right, although the critics usually adored him.
Indeed, apart from Pirates, few among his long list of credits have earned real money, a point emphasized by Forbes in 2016 when it named him Hollywood’s most overpaid actor and gleefully recorded a parade of flops — Alice Through the Looking Glass, Mortdecai, The Rum Diary, Dark Shadows and The Lone Ranger.
The money Depp was hauling in from the Pirates franchise was a hefty cushion that allowed him to disregard these embarrassments. Did it also encourage such a strong belief in his own invincibility that he allowed himself to be propelled into a reckless spiral of self-destruction? Some would say it was made worse by his breakup with longtime partner Vanessa Paradis — the image of the devoted family man living quietly in France between jobs was suddenly shattered. His brief and stormy marriage to Heard followed — and with it came mounting reports of obsessive overspending, substance abuse and violence on the set.
Depp has always been a bundle of contradictions.
It can be hard to reconcile the gentle, sweet-natured and painfully vulnerable characters he portrayed in Edward Scissorhands or Finding Neverland with the affected foppery of Jack Sparrow — or in real life with the kid star who once demolished a five-diamond Manhattan hotel suite in a fit of rage after a fight with then girlfriend Kate Moss.
In an odd sense, the actual Depp persona has always seemed elusive, which is perhaps why he’ll feel comfortable as the shape-shifting Gellert Grindelwald in J.K. Rowling ’s Fantastic Beasts cycle — a project that could be a lifeline for him, despite the carping of fans over his casting.
Over the years, the media have cut him a lot of slack. He can be friendly with the press, although at times barely articulate. He can also be honest — consider his admission that he refuses to see any of his movies. Yet, he has always seemed a muffled presence.
Talking to Postmedia in Paris a few years ago, his eccentricities were on full display: shaggy uncut hair, tinted horn-rimmed glasses, baggy denims with a second pair of shades stuck in the pocket of his jean jacket, four monstrous rings on his fingers, tattoos on his knuckles, a cheap wristwatch, two scarves wrapped around his neck as he amiably mumbled answers in an overheated hotel suite.
Given the image Depp has managed to build for himself, it’s easy to believe that such mannerisms are for real, that they’re uncalculated — but are they really? They could also be suggesting a human being in hiding. The same can be said of many of his best-known roles — from Edward Scissorhands to the Mad Hatter to Captain Jack Sparrow. When, a few years ago, he played someone approaching himself in the romantic thriller The Tourist he emerged as an ordinary, uninteresting actor.
Today, Depp is no longer a kid. He’s a troubled, haunted 55-yearold — and it shows in those recent photographs of a middleaged man gaunt and haggard under the merciless glare of the paparazzi.
And now, he’s lost his security blanket. The writing team behind Deadpool is working on a reboot of Pirates of the Caribbean. Disney seems confident the franchise can survive without Depp, promising to deliver “a new energy and vitality.”
Furthermore, if Depp thought he could refurbish his career by subjecting himself to an interview from Rolling Stone published in June 2018, he was wrong. The unflattering profile that resulted dismisses him as an aging man-child.
Now, that’s cruel. But is it also true?