What Makes Johnny Famous - part 2

Disappointed with the outcome of his part in Platoon, Depp accepted the job to play an undercover high school cop named Tom Hanson on 21 Jump Street, a decision he says was almost entirely wrong. He never wanted to be a TV actor, but the prospect of a steady paycheck and his hunch that the show wouldn't last more than a season outweighed his artistic ambitions. "Actually, there were good people involved, and in terms of the camera, the lighting, marks, television is a great education" Depp says. "So that was like college for me. So that was like college for me. But I just didn't want to be involved in that kind of assembly-line shit, you know? I didn't want to be a product. I didn't want to be a product. I didn't want to be that thing, that hunk shit or whatever. It wasn't me.

21 Jump Street became the flagship show for Fox, and consequently Depp became the poster child for the up-and-coming network, his face on every ad they took out. "He was the star," says DeLuise. "There was no doubt in anybody's mind, and I think he really resented that. On the show they would always randomly cut back to his face while he was listening to other people talk--he was forced to react and make faces, and that made him mad. So Jim [Whitmore, the director] came up this great idea: he said "I'l tell you what, you don't have to make faces, I will give you the subtext of the scene. There is poop somewhere nearby, and at the beginning of the scene you sense there is poop, and then you actually smell the poop, and then you can't seem to get away from the poop, and then you need to know where the poop is. Now just work on that." And if you look at the expression on Johnny's face, he is trying to find the poop."

"I was bored to tears and I was dying," Depp says of his days on the show. "I was chewing my own leg. Whitmore would do things like that to keep the scene interesting for me. If you had the subtext that somewhere in this room was shit, it made a lot more go on during the scene."

Around this time in Baltimore, John Waters (Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble) was looking through teen magazines for a boy to play the role of Cry Baby Walker, a leather clad "drape" with a tatoo of an electric chair on his chest. "With Cry Baby, I was trying to make a job, a satire of an Elvis movie," Waters explains, "and to me, Johnny certainly looked right. He looked like the perfect juvenile delinquent. Then I watched 21 Jump Street and I met him and I knew he had a sense of humor--that was the main thing. And he told me he hated being a teen idol. I said, 'Stick with us, we'll kill that. Don't worry.'"

"John saved me, he really did," Depp says. "Because I was desperate to get out of that mold, y'know, and desperate to not be a product anymore. And by doing Cry Baby, and John giving me that gig, it was a major turning point. I always like to say that John Waters made me a millionaire. I used to always say that to him: "'Do you realize you made me a millionaire?'"

But it was a symbiotic relationship. Without Depp, Waters wouldn't have been able to get the money to make the type of campy musical he wanted to make, and without Waters, depp wouldn't have gotten the chance to spit at his own face. And it worked. "Cry Baby still plays constantly on cable and all over Europe, and that's thanks to Johnny. Because even if it was not successful in some countries, it can play now because it's a Johnny Depp movie, not a John Waters movie. And I think Johnny can thank me for ending him being a teen idol."

Though barely any of Depp's teen magazine-reading fans ever saw the movie, the right people obviously got the joke because that same year (1990) Depp was cast in the highly sought-after role of Edward Scissorhands. "I didn't even want to meet Tim Burton [who was just coming off Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice]," Depp recalls. "I wanted to but I thought it was pointless. Tracy [Jacobs, Depp's agent] forced me to. I just said, 'No way, it's embarrassing.' You know, something you want so badly and he's never gonna see me as that, never. He's gonna think, 'Aaw, fuckin' TV actor shit.' Everybody wanted that fuckin' role, so I just thought, 'Hell, why would he give it to me?'"

Burton did give it to him, and subsequently added to the image-smearing process that Waters had started. After Depp had gone overboard proving what he wasn't in Cry Baby, he found in Edward a character that he truly identified with. "I just knew the guy, I knew the character. I knew everything," he says. "I remember it was the 89th day--right before I did my last shot on the movie which was doing the ice sculpture with Kim, Winona's character. And I remember getting the makeup on, and everything, and looking in the mirror before I went to set, and I'm thinking, 'Fuck, this is the last time I'm gonna see this guy,' you kow, this is it, this is the last time. It was like saying goodbye. It fuckin' made me cry, it was weird, it was bizarre. I really, really, really miss him."

Did you know there's a porno called Edward Penishands?
"Yeah, I've seen it," Depp says. "It's great, it's really funny. It's the same deal, y'know, Edward, the fuckin' hair and everything, and the suit, the black thing, but instead of scissors for hands, he's got these massive fuckin' penises, just huge dicks on each hand--huge, though. He's real timid and all that stuff, and girls come to him and really like him a lot, and, y'know, he can fuck three women--he's got one here, one here, and then he's got his own."

What feature do you look for in a woman?
"Everything."

How do you feel about feet?
"Feet are very important. Feet are very, very important."

Are they pretty high up on the priority list?
"Way up, yeah, about top two."

What would be an example of bad feet?
"Bad feet, let's see. Long toenails. Horrible, can't even think about it. Long toenails is a bad move. It's just an awful image, y'know."

What if the second toe is longer than the first toe?
"That's okay. It depends, y'know, the aesthetic of the...there should be a certain symmetry to feet. And I'm not a big symmetry fan. I like things a bit asymmetrical--in fact I need that--but feet, there's gotta be a certain symmetry to the feet. Feet say a lot. If a girl doesn't take care of her feet, there may be problems elsewhere."

Do you think it's important to be able to fart in front of each other in a relationship?
"I'm not so sure."

No?
"Hmm..."

She shouldn't
"I'm not sure she should."

Should you?
"I'm not sure it's the kind of thing that boys and girls should be doing together. Some things should be private, you know?"

"Johnny has a Porsche, right, and he had to pick Marlon Brando up from his house--they were going somewhere--and Brando was like, 'John, I'm so disappointed, I can't believe you have a Porsche, I don't want to be seen with you in this car, how can you possibly...'" recalls Jarmusch. "This whole thing with Brando--'I'm not riding in a Porsche with John'--he was really putting it down, it was really funny."

Depp's black Porsche Carrera 4 is parked near a sealed green gate in the Hollywood Hills. There is a security key pad next to the gate and a camera to see who's pressing the buttons. The doors open, and I look around what was once Bela Lugosi's backyard (Depp bought the house in 1995 for $2.3 million). It looks gothic and intricate, like a dirty Hollywood castle that was scrubbed clean. A big metal, yellow gorilla stands near the edge of the property with a large, semi-erect penis spewing forth a stream of water that, I'm told, is sometimes cranked up and pointed into the neighbor's yard. The words "You Can Run But You Can't Hide" are spray painted in black letters across his chest. "Something they did annoyed him so he rigged it up so it would piss on them," Jarmusch says, "which is very Johnny. He has this adolescent kind of humor, and that prankster-style revenge."

The security camera is connected to a four-part black-and-white monitor that sits in what could otherwise be a kitchen in a Better Homes and Gardens spread (aside from the few cans of Drum tobacco on the kitchen table. There is a basket of fruit, boxes of cereal, stacks of books, pots, pans, and candles. There is a bottle of Cuervo 1800 on the window sill, a black-and-white pit-bull mix names Moo (a gift from Moss, who Depp met in February 1994 and dated until recently), Palmolive by the sink and a man, Mr. Pink (who lives in the guest house), making a salad that Johnny apparently adores. This is the brightest room in the house.

The bar is off the kitchen. There are beers on draft, a stocked wall of booze, a sound system, and low-dipping leather chairs placed around an old table. In the corner are the steel painted scissorhands displayed in a glass case, as well as a prototype for an Edward Scissorhands doll that never got made, and the wispy wig for his part in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. On the walls hang paintings, the Wanted poster from Dead Man, a personalized record plaque from Oasis, pictures of Kerouac, Burroughs, Cocteau.

Sitting deep in a chair, Depp is rolling and smoking Drum after Drum and telling me how people have called him Johnny his whole like. "My grandfather would call me Big John, but my mom and dad and sisters and brother, they always called me Johnny. People always say it sounds fake--Johnny Depp. I remember when I was with my first agent and she said, 'Um, what do you want your name to be?' It was such an odd question, I said, 'What do you mean?' And she said, 'You know, in the credits and stuff.' And I said, "Johnny, I guess. Johnny Depp. Why?' 'Are you sure you don't want to be John Depp or John Christopher Depp or John Depp II or John Christopher Depp II?'"

The youngest of four children (two sisters, one brother), Depp grew up in the working-class suburb of Owensboro, Kentucky. Their house and neighborhood, Depp says, were similar to the 1950s pastel land of Edward Scissorhands: tract housing, neat lawns, quiet streets. John Depp Sr. was a public servant working as a civil engineer, and his wife, Betty Sue (whose name Johnny had tattooed on his left bicep), was a waitress at a local restaurant--she gave birth to her most famous child on June 9, 1963. "My mom is one of my best friends in the world," Depp says. "It's interesting, my dad's a big guy, a really fuckin' tough-looking guy, but the advice [on how to fight] came from my mom. I'll never forget it, she told me when I was little: 'Lookit, you get in a fight with somebody, and they're bigger than you, you pick up the biggest fuckin' brick you can find and you lay 'em out, you just fuckin' knock 'em out.'"

When Depp was seven, the family moved to Endora, Florida, a small town near Miami. They lived in a motel for a year before his father found work as a public works official. It was in Endora that Depp would meet Sal Jenco, his best friend since then who now runs Depp's Hollywood club, the Viper Room (opened in August 1993)--and the inspiration for the name of Iggy Pop's cross-dressing character in Dead Man.

Depp was always more interested in rock 'n' roll types than sports figures, but says that when he was a kid, he could tell you every player on the Miami Dolphins. "I can remember being a little kid in Florida and loving Jim Kick," he says. "It was Kick and Csonka, they were the running backs. And I loved Jim Kick. Not because he was a brilliant player--he was a good back, he was solid--but I loved him because he was the first guy in the NFL to have long hair and a Fu Manchu, you know? I liked him because he was an outsider."

Despite a face that one might assume would automatically put Depp in the popular clique of his high school, he maintains that, like Kick, he was an outsider. "High school can be fun I guess, hang out with girls, make friends and all that shit, but that just wasn't for me," he says. "There were sort of different classes of people--I guess it still exists. There are the jocks, and the smart kids with good grades and stuff, and there was like rednecks or something, and then there are the burnouts. I was considered a burnout. I was just, you know, kid of a weed-head."

He avoids specifics, but says that he went through a difficult period when he was 15 years old and his parents got divorced. "I had issues, major problems with that, how [my father] left and what-not. So we had a little bit of a rough spot, but we cleared it up and we're good now, now we get along real well. Yeah, I love my pop. And I love--you know, I worship my mom."

Though as a kid he liked to flip through the channels looking for old black-and white movies, especially Dracula and Frankenstein, Depp says he never even considered a career in film. He remembers his older brother Dan introducing him to A Clockwork Orange and Last Tango in Paris (his first glimpse at Brando) when he was 13, but it was the guitar his mother bought him that same year that would have the greatest impact on the youngest Depp. He learned to play sitting in his room, and when he was 17, he joined a local band called The Kids. They became well known in the South Florida punk rock scene--opening for Iggy Pop, Talking Heads, the Pretenders, The Ramones--and Depp truly thought that they were going to make it. He says the music was "kind of loud, aggressive power pop--at the time I would've compared it to early U2."

When he was 20, Depp moved to L.A. with the band (renamed Six Gun Method because they weren't kids anymore) in search of "the almighty record deal." They did okay, bu their presence was nothing compared to what it was in Florida. "It was real difficult out in L.A.--we'd play at these little clubs," he says. "We were trying to build a following and stuff, but you make no money. You'd make literally, like, 25 bucks." To supplement his income, Depp took to selling pens over the phone, "My first experience with acting," he says.

Before long, "the band sort of stopped. We were all homesick and the majority of them split. I was sort of left hanging with no band," Depp says, "and I was just going to make the movie."

The movie was Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street. Depp's ex-wife Lori had introduced him to Nicolas Cage, who convinced him to go on his first casting call in front of the director, whose young daughter happened to be there watching and seems to have been instrumental in getting Depp the job. He earned $1,200 a week--"shocking money," he says--and made his screen debut as Glen Lantz, the main character's preppy boyfriend who falls asleep and gets swallowed by a bed and then spit up with a stream of blood. The aspiring rock 'n' roller was now an actor.

"To me he's more a rock 'n' roll-type guy than a Hollywood guy," Jarmusch says, a perception that is only strengthened by Depp's high-profile girlfriends, his association with bands like Oasis, the Butthold Surfers, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the fact that he got caught tossing things around a hotel room. In September 1994, Depp made all the papers when he was arrested at New York's Mark Hotel and charged wit htwo counts of criminal mischief after allegedly trashing the hotel room where he was staying with Moss. It was perhaps his biggest--and most ironic--media moment: The boy who became a household face playing a copy on TV, then satirized the copy by getting arrested in Cry Baby, was now in the pages of People wearing a ski hat and sunglasses, being escorted to the 19th Precinct in handcuffs.

"People did a piece on me like I was some kind of hellion on the road to ruin," Depp says. "And they went out and found the picture that made me look the most unhealthy and debauched and put it on the cover. Such disgusting pigs."

Have you ever spent a fair amount of time with a writer, trusted them, and then they twisted the story around and wrote some slasher piece about you?
"Absolutely," Depp says.

Want to yell at anyone?
"There was this cretin at Esquire magazine--and they were cunts, man--it was after the Mark incident, and this guy had a hard-on for me in the worst way, it was so apparent, he wore it all over his face and his clothing--it was all over him. And when I showed up for the photo shoot, they had built an entire hotel suite on stage. And this fuckin' weak pathetic photographer--this glorified paparazzi--was going along with this idea. And I said, 'What's this for?' and he said, 'Well, we thought, or the magazine thought, you might enjoy taking the piss out of the incident and just beating the shit out of this hotel room and just fucking destroying it.' I said. 'Wow, this must have cost you a lot of money, building this.' 'Yeah, it really did,' he said. And I said, 'I'm not fucking touching it.'"

Back at the table in the bar of Depp's house, I pull out a copy of a cheezy unauthorized biography called Johnny Depp: A Modern Rebel. There is a picture of him as Cry Baby on the cover--leather jacket, Elvis hair, a tattooed tear dripping from his left eye--but the irony of Waters's creation is completely lost in this context. It looks earnest.

Getting arrested in front of a camera may have been the most effective scene in Depp's image-killing campaign, but the incident launched a whole new set of labels. "A modern rebel," Depp says, laughing, holding the book. "Someone showed this to me, and at first I was like, 'Oh fuck.' But then--check this out..." He turns to the introduction and points to the first photo in the book. It's a full-page shot: gelled hair, face half-buried in the crook of his arm, one eye peeking out at the reader. It isn't him. Depp laughs and says the guy in the photo looks like he's from New Jersey or something, that he has never tight-rolled his jeans like that, and most importantly, the guy in the picture can grow a beard--Depp can't. He hands the book back to me with a smile that seems almost proud. "That's what makes this book fucking genius."

Description Background Current Info Interviews
PHOTOS - Portraits Candids Stills Covers Mix
Credits Trivia Links Books
Return to Depp home page