Minx Magazine
December 1998
by Polly Vernon
(Transcript by Langley)

"I Am Definitely The Ugliest Woman In The World" Johnny Depp

Beautiful, barking and now bald. If you don't fancy him by the end of this we'll send you chocolate (and the name of a good doctor).

Johnny Depp is late for an interview session. Three hours late, to be precise. In the conference room of the sun-lit, so-exclusively-chick-and-pricey-it-hurts Hotel du Cap just outside Cannes, entourage types are nibbling nervously at clipboards, and desperately spewing out excuses about his tardiness.

Outside, Hugh and Liz are sulking, Gerard Depardieu is sunning himself on the terrace, and movie actress Jeanne Tripplehorn is swinging about in high heels. Gaggles of cross journalists, conspicuous in their badly-dressed plainness, are stomping around, swearing about missed appointments. They're all waiting for Johnny. Everyone's waiting for Johnny.

Unsubstantiated Johnny rumor one
Geri Halliwell was offered a part in Depp's next film, The Ninth Gate

Stories about Johnny's precise whereabouts are flying around faster than the petite public relations officer who's running about trying to calm down increasingly rampant journalists. A Belgian reporter thinks she saw someone bearing an uncanny resemblance to our boy swimming in the bit of sea the Hotel du Cap has barricaded off in a proprietorial fashion. We all dash out onto a sun-drenched balcony to see if we can spot him. A dark head is bobbing about in the distance, but, what with being blinded by the light bouncing off the water, it's hard to say for sure whether it's him or Barry Norman.

Someone else says he's in bed with Kate Moss (despite rumours linking him with Vanessa Paradis), and his publicist is too scared to go and disentangle him. His publicist is a big blonde, sporting head-to-toe Donna Karan and calmly sipping mineral water in the bar. She doesn't look like she'd be scared of anyone. Ever. She looks more like she scares other people.

Someone else claims Johnny's so pissed off with the critics' lukewarm reaction to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (due out this month), that he's sulking and refusing to come out. Whatever, one thing is clear. He's obviously a petulant, up himself, arrogant berk who can't be bothered to do interviews anymore. Hmmph.

"He's an equal opportunities icon. Even lesbians love him." John Waters, director, Cry Baby

When Johnny finally does appear, a full 24 hours later, the journalists have worked themselves into a frenzy. They're threatening to ask Difficult Questions. "I'm going to ask him about that time he and Kate smashed up a hotel room," mutters a bad-tempered Swede, darkly.

"I'm going to ask him what he thinks is the most valuable virtue in a celebrity. And when he says 'Respect', I'm going to ask him how come he made us wait so long," spits a determined Dutch man.

However, from the minute Johnny Depp pads unassumingly across the room, dressed in a too-big, creased pin-stripe suit and muddy boots, and scrunches himself up into a chair, everyone forgets their bad intentions.

He's way too beautiful to be cross with. His face is exquisite, chiseled and delicate, brooding and haunted. He's charming and humble, and not at all up himself, and he says things along the lines of "I am very lucky to have this job. And that's what it is, it's a job." His hair, which was alarmingly shaved into convincing baldness for his Fear and Loathing role, is all there, and thick and wavy and auburn (yes, auburn-also-known-as-ginger), and dammit yes, the kind of thing you have to sit on your hands to stop yourself reaching out and stroking. So, seeing as I'm completely fixated, it seems like a fair starting point for our conversation. Johnny - how was it, being a baldy?

"It's not easy waking up to that every morning," he smiles, lazily. "You wake up and you're bleary-eyed and you put your toothpaste on the toothbrush and you look in the mirror, and then, 'Oh God, there it is...'"

Terry Gilliam, director of Fear and Loathing, is proud to tell the world that he likes to take sexy young actors and make them ugly, which was why he got Johnny to shave, and Johnny's co-star, Benicio Del Toro, to eat loads in the name of developing a monstrous beer gut. But Johnny wouldn't have had it any other way. "I knew I was gonna have to do it from the start. Benicio and I had this meeting early on, and we looked at each other, and it was like 'Here we go'. He had to eat pizza and pasta and drink beer, and I had to shave...But it was important for me to take on Hunter's physical aspects."

It has to be said, when you're as beautiful as Johnny, you can risk the occasional on-screen foray into ugly world. There's something almost masochistic about his determination not to use his cheekbones and pout to pull the punters into the cinemas. From his messed-up, scarred, unfinished Edward Scissorhands to the geeky gawkiness of Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing, Depp permanently goes all out to disguise his gorgeousness.

"I'm not sure which is the better look," he muses. "Drag, for Ed Wood, when I was this kind of Amazon, computer-altered, bizarre, ugly image of Claudia Schiffer; or bald. Though I am definitely the ugliest woman in the world."

Unsubstantiated Johnny rumor two
Johnny was stalked by a transvestite claiming to be his wife

If Johnny is gutted about initial reactions to his new film, he isn't letting on. He seems as happy and as chilled as his huge, haunted eyes will let him. It should be said that Fear and Loathing was unfairly slated. The film is funny, messy and touching. And as Raoul Duke, Hunter S. Thompson's fictional alter ego, Depp is superb; playing the part in his customary edgy, weirdy, fucked-up fashion. John Waters once said of Johnny, "He has the ability to make eccentric characters seem like real people. I think regular movie goers are more apt to go along with him into weird world...", which is good because, in case you don't already know, Hunter S. Thompson is weird. And mad. He's the '70s cult author, who didn't come to Britain to publicise his last book because, as he told his publishers, he got bit by a crocodile. Johnny is unashamedly impressed by him. He talks about Thompson more than he talks about himself, breathlessly and animatedly, immediately playing the part again. You get the feeling Johnny would like to be Hunter.

"It was real difficult, on one hand, you have...this great package you could steal from, but I was so freaked out about the idea of disappointing Hunter, that it was a very difficult thing. But he saw it last week and...he said 'I will become the warped sweet-heart of America'. He said that the film is an eerie trumpet call over a lost battlefield. I thought that was so beautiful."

Benicio Del Toro said that Johnny was so scarily convincing in the role, that when Hunter visited the set everyone was saying, 'Look, Hunter's doing Johnny.' Johnny replies, "I clearly spent way too much time with Hunter. I went too deep...It was scary to have him see me play him. He's an excellent marksman with access to a lot of weapons."

To prepare for the part, Johnny spent three months hiding out in Hunter's basement. He nearly blew himself up by caning fags and flicking matches, completely unaware that Thompson had stowed a large keg of gunpowder down there with him. Though, to be fair, their first meeting should have forewarned him.

"I went to Aspen in 1995 with my girl [Kate Moss. He always calls her "my girl"], because we wanted to see some snow. We were in this bar, and I knew Hunter was coming over. The door burst open and there was this hulking brute of a figure, waving a stun gun in one hand, and an electrified cattle prod in the other. Little lightening sparks were coming out of it. People were ducking out of his way to avoid being hit. So he sits down with me, hits me over the head with the cattle prod, and we start drinking. An hour and a half later, we're back at his house. He shows me this huge bomb he's built in his kitchen, and we take it outside, really, really carefully, and then I shoot it." It conjures up a great picture: delicate, kitten-heeled Kate tagging along and blowing shit up.

"Hey Skeet, Johnny Depp just called. He wants his DNA back." Saturday Night Live's David Spade to alleged Depp-alike, Skeet Ulrich

Johnny knows how to tell a story. His next one is about a meeting with John Malkovich to discuss up-coming film project The Libertine. When he slides into a brilliant impression of Malkovich, he's got a distinctly luvvie quality about him. Something you wouldn't necessarily expect from a self-proclaimed white trash high school drop-out who went to LA to become a rock star, and ended up a teeny heart throb by mistake.

But Serious Actor is what Johnny's always wanted to be. Vincent Gallo, his co-star in Arizona Dream, once said: "I fancy myself as a movie star. Johnny Depp is a movie star who fancies himself as an actor." And Johnny grimaces when he considers his fluffy teen idol past in US cop-soap 21 Jump Street; remembering that time when his pretty boy looks, and a chance meeting with Nicolas Cage (who he didn't like at first), derailed him from the path of rock god into mainstream acting. He pulls his feet up onto his seat and tucks them under him defensively.

"Between '88 and '90...it was suddenly a little out of control, it was someone else's idea of me. I didn't realize what was happening until I was at home, eating dinner with the TV on in the background, and all of a sudden I heard [cheesy TV announcer voice] 'Johnny Depp...' and I looked up at the television and there's this montage of me slow- motion running...and I realized at that point, 'My God, they've turned me into a Tootsie Pop.' But I fought it like a bastard, like an angry, violent animal."

But surely being labeled the new James Dean when you were only really starting out wasn't too much of a problem?

"Huh. 'The New James Dean'. I don't know how many actors that's happened to. Every one of us, probably. We come out of the block, we're on the screen and suddenly it's like: 'Oooo...the New James Dean!'."

What if soon it's, "He's the New Johnny Depp"?

"Yeah, well, I'm the Old Johnny Depp."

I want to be an old man, with a beer belly, on a porch." Johnny Depp

Depp once famously claimed: "People perceive me as some hotel-wrecking, drug-addled...fiend. I'm not remotely close to that. Not slightly", so I wonder how he, well, researched the fantastically drug-addled role of Fear and Loathing's Duke. I mean, he's just so convincing...

"I've dabbled in my youth and I know what some stuff is like. A lot of the drugs were invented, made up. I don't think anyone ever actually chewed on a human pituitary gland. It was a collaborative effort, and an act of hyper imagination, and of research."

And is he worried he's going to get slammed by the moral majority for glorifying chewing on a human pituitary gland and other drug consumption?

"To say it glamorizes drugs, or promotes drug use in any way, is insane. You watch what those people go through...and you say: 'Hey, I'd like to feel like that, yeah, I'm gonna take some chemicals and vomit for an hour, or see my best friend grow...six hairy tits on his back'. I don't think so."

Somewhere on his glorious, lithe, olive-skinned body, Johnny's allegedly got a doctored tattoo that once famously read "Winona Forever" (a legacy from one of his serial engagements) and now reads "Wino Forever". I can't see that, but I can see the number three he's got tattooed on the middle finger of one hand. So what's going on with that?

"Three's a good number for me." Then: "My body is a sort of journal. All the experiences that I've been through, lived through, whatever, sometimes you end up with scars on your hands. And sometimes you put them there yourself to remember something. It's like a journal, a journal on the skin."

Somehow, when Johnny Depp says wanky things like that, it makes you nod sagely and feel privileged to be in the presence of such wisdom. Because there is something incredibly wise about him. Something wise, something bright, something funny and something thoughtful. Every other journalist in the room agrees. In the space of a paltry interview session, Johnny Depp enchants a load of hard-bitten hacks who, an hour ago, loathed his tight little pinstripe-clad butt.

But hey, that's icon behaviour for you. However badly they piss you off, they'll always leave you wishing they would be your friend.

END OF ARTICLE

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