MARTYN PALMER ‘MY WILD NIGHTS WITH JOHNNY’

Meeting Johnny Depp is never dull. I’ve spent time with him on various film sets, in a penthouse suite overlooking the strip in Las Vegas, at the Cannes and Venice film festivals and once, surreally, on the Isle of Man where an 8ft tall, orange phallus was propped precariously outside his Winnebago.

Well, he was playing the legendary, 17thcentury exponent of debauchery, the Earl of Rochester in The Libertine. Depp welcomed me into his trailer, offered a glass of wine and asked if I’d noticed the giant – for want of a better phrase – prop. “It’s impressive, don’t you think?’ he smiled. “I think they should keep it here, like a tourist attraction.”

Depp was softly spoken, intense, unfailingly polite, other-worldly and very funny. He loves the Brits and our sense of humour – he popped up on The Vicar of Dibley and The Fast Show, don’t forget – and he’s lived here, happily, for months at a stretch while filming.

Many famous actors, when you meet them, are disappointingly dull. Spending an hour trying to get some of them to say anything interesting can be as much fun as filling in a tax return.

Depp carries with him the characters he has played – the loners, the freaks and the oddballs. Adorned with tattoos long before they became as ubiquitous as denim jeans, he dressed like the rock-and-roll star one suspects he always wanted to be, and relentlessly undermined the heartthrob label that Hollywood tried to pin on him.

It’s telling that his major mainstream role – Captain Jack Sparrow, from the multi-billiondollar Pirates of the Caribbean franchise – is yet another celebration of a misfit.

Our early encounters were overshadowed with tales of excess; an interview postponed in Cannes after rumours of a late night with his then girlfriend Kate Moss. When he did show up, a day later, he was monosyllabic and withdrawn. Later, when he was married to Vanessa Paradis, he was more at ease.

But one extraordinary night will always come to mind. Depp had made The Rum Diary, a tribute to two of his heroes – based on the book by his close friend, Hunter S Thompson and directed by Bruce Robinson, the Brit who created one of Depp’s favourite films, Withnail & I.

Negotiations for the interview had gone on for months. Finally, I was told to head to a posh London hotel on a Saturday evening, before being whisked to Depp’s £50million rented house. Inside, he welcomed us with a bottle of Château Haut-brion (1996, £364 a bottle at the time).

Five bottles – at least – later, I had been regaled with tales of the isolation he felt growing up, a near-death experience when the engines failed on a private jet, shooting a propane-filled gas canister with a 12-gauge shotgun on the night he first met Thompson and the revealing admission that he only really felt comfortable when on set, filming.

“Outside in life people are looking at you and staring at you,” he said. “You see them taking your picture all the time with their iphones. You become a kind of novelty in the world.”

Now, of course, Depp’s world is under the most relentless scrutiny of all.