WHEN THE GOING GETS WEIRD THE WEIRD TURN PRO

Johnny Depp is different. He's not like every other actor in Hollywood. He's a rebel. A loner. An outsider. He dates models. Plays in a band. Buys Kerouac memorabilia. He has a part-stake in a nightclub. He... Wait a minute. What IS the difference?

Story by DANNY LEIGH
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Actors, by and large, are liars. They lie about their age, about their sexuality, about themselves and each other. They lie so much and so often that their lies become meaningless. They'll say they found working with their latest co-star a great experience when they spent the whole shoot wishing them dead. They'll say they take a genuine pride in their new film when they'd rather every print was burned. And they'll say, like a mantra, that they just want to do good work, that the script drew them to the movie, that they choose to accept only the roles they feel challenged by.

But not Johnny Depp. Johnny's different. Words that turn to dust in the mouths of other actors seem somehow unquestionable coming from Hollywood's in-house outsider. Everybody knows about Johnny. Johnny plays freaks, misfits, weirdos. Johnny plays by his own rules. He's the self-appointed square peg who terrifies and perplexes the industry with his refusal to do what he's told or what's expected. That's Johnny.

Apparently. Yet for someone with such a clearly defined public image, he's still known, even now, less for what he is than what he isn't, less for what he does than what he doesn't. Johnny Depp isn't Tom Cruise, or Brad Pitt, or Matt Damon, or Nicolas Cage, or Keanu Reeves, or, most of all, his tireless mimic Skeet Ulrich. Having turned their producers down, he isn't the star of 'Interview with The Vampire', 'Speed', 'Chaplin', 'Thelma and Louise' or 'The Saint'. He doesn't do comedy. He doesn't do action. He doesn't do John Grisham adaptations, or anything directed by James Cameron, or Tarantino, or Spielberg. Look through a list of movies released so far this year, and you can bet he wouldn't have done any of them bar the one he actually did - Terry Gilliam's film of Hunter S Thompson's unfilmable 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'. Depp plays Thompson. Or rather Thompson as his drug-crazed alter ego Raoul Duke: the quintessential pop-culture outlaw.

In 1988, at the height of his mainstream pin-up popularity, Johnny Depp stated that he never wanted "to make a career out of taking my shirt off". Instead, he said, one day he'd like to get to shave his head. A decade later he got his wish: to prepare for the part of Hunter/Duke, Depp's scalp was shaved and fitted with a toupee of exactly 17 hairs.

Here, rather than just playing an extension of his own persona, was a chance to immerse himself completely in someone else. Someone totally different to his own screen presence - someone wired, manic, urgent... and real. "He loves escaping from Johnny Depp," says Gilliam.

To get in shape for the part, Depp spent four months in the company of the man who, in 1971, accepted a 'Rolling Stone' commission to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle races in Las Vegas. Hunter turned in a catalogue of debauchery - part fact, part fiction (who knows in what ratio?) - that took the writer on a mescaline-enriched journey into America's neon heart and that patented 'gonzo' journalism.

Now holed up in Woody Creek, Colorado, leading a largely nocturnal existence, Thompson took Depp under his wing, taking him out into the desert to shoot guns and make bombs. Depp studied well, and though his interpretation of Thompson's behaviour patterns show how far Depp's acting talents have stretched lately, the actor himself was not impressed. "During the first screening of the film, I was watching Johnny down in the front row," says Gilliam. "He was dying. Twitching. Squirming. It was painful to watch. And he said afterwards that what depressed him was the two or three times he saw himself up there."

But Dr Gonzo was impressed. "Johnny's really good to work with," he says. "Yeah. He's fun." Depp would be flattered. He first read 'Fear and Loathing' when he was 17, and claims to have read all of Thompson's books since. "I think he's a genius," says Depp. "I think he's one of the greatest minds of the 20th century. He's one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He's up there with Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and those people."

Depp says he's part of the generation that adopted Thompson. But isn't he a little young? "I'm long in the tooth," he drawls. "This book takes place in 1971. I was eight, and I can remember watching Vietnam on the television as we sat down to dinner. I remember vividly watching the Watergate trials on TV. I remember all those names - John Dean, Erlichmann, Howard Hunt - from when I was a kid. These are all pretty strong images for a little kid."

Having been party to the process so many times, Depp can dictate the opening paragraph of his story to journalists verbatim. "He was born in Kentucky," he begins, head lolling and voice monotone, "he's the youngest of four children, he moved to Miramar, Florida, his parents got divorced, he dropped out of school, he played in a band, he has tattoos."

All true. John Christopher Depp II was indeed born in Owensboro, Kentucky in June 1963 to a waitress mother, Betty Sue, and an engineer father called John. Over the next seven years, the family were constantly in transit as John Sr tried to find work, living in over 20 houses scattered across Kentucky. "I don't even have a mental picture of the places we lived in," Depp says now, "because there were so many of them."

In 1970 the Depps relocated to the working-class Miami suburb of Miramar. According to his own recollections, the baby of the family was doing drugs ("nickel bags of weed") at 11, playing guitar at 12 and losing his virginity by 13. The next milestone came with his parents' divorce when he was 15, after which a depressed Betty Sue increasingly came to rely on her youngest son for practical and moral support. The pair remain close; Depp has his mother's name tattooed on his arm.

At 16 he abandoned high school to focus his energies on The Kids, a covers band in which he played guitar. After a lengthy stint on the $25-a-night South Florida club circuit, Depp and friends ascended to opening act for the bafflingly diverse likes of Iggy Pop, Chuck Berry, The Pretenders and A Flock of Seagulls. In 1983, assured of their destiny, the band changed their name to Six Gun Method and headed for Los Angeles. Unsigned, they split up shortly after.

By this point 20-year-old Depp had managed to get himself married, to Lori Anne Allison, a make-up artist five years his senior. While the nuptials were short-lived (they divorced in 1985, with Depp later describing their relationship as "a bond, but not love"), Lori Anne did have time to introduce her then-husband to a professional acquaintance, Nicolas Cage. Cage offered to fix him up with an audition for an acting job. And Depp, not having much else on besides a job selling pens over the telephone, accepted the invitation.

Which is how, in 1985, after reading opposite the director's smitten teenage daughter, he found his way into Wes Craven's 'Nightmare on Elm Street'. As the film's male lead? Actually no. Pouting A-list movie star Johnny Depp appeared as a bloody geyser after being sucked into his bed, the gormless himbo victim of dreamstalker Freddy Krueger.

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"Dumbfounded, lost, shoved down the gullets of America as a Young Republican. TV Boy, Heart-throb, Teen Idol, Teen Hunk. Plastered, postered, postured, patented, painted, plastic!!! Stapled to a box of cereal with wheels, doing 200mph on a one-way collision course bound for thermos and lunch-box antiquity. Novelty Boy, Franchise Boy, fucked and plucked, with no escape from this nightmare." - Excerpt from Johnny Depp's preface to 'Burton on Burton' (Faber & Faber, 1991)

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It's probably fair to say that Johnny Depp didn't like his next move, '21 Jump Street', any more than he liked the four-series contract with which he was tied to it. Though the show made him a TV star, he felt no gratitude to the producers for the countless interviews in magazines such as 'Tiger Beat' and 'The Big Bopper', during which he was obliged to portray himself as the archetypal boy next door and advise his pre-teen female fans to "Just Say No". Nor did he relish the 10,000 letters every month from said fans, variously enclosing their pubic hair, promises they could "suck a bowling ball through a garden hose" or warnings that, unless he called them that day at a specific time, they would kill themselves.

Then there were the "borderline fascist" plots he waded through as Tom Hanson, a supernaturally youthful cop sent undercover into an LA high school to bust crack dealers and porn rings. "I began thinking, There's 365 days in a year," Depp recalls, "and for 275 of them I'm saying someone else's words. And they're bad words."

So he changed the words: piquant dialogue such as "This is a great place, Doug, this is like your other place" became "Nice digs, Doug, you dog. Dig 'em." He went to the producers suggesting his character first become fixated with peanut butter, then be discovered smearing it over his naked body. In 1990 Depp's contract finally expired. '21 Jump Street' was over.

And he hasn't stopped running from it since. Realising that his basic problem stemmed from the inability to "stand the idea that someone was selling this character called Johnny Depp", the former pen salesman took the job on himself.

A fixture in gossip columns through his burgeoning relationship with Winona Ryder - the celebrated 'Winona Forever' tattoo was amended relatively recently to 'Wino Forever' - Depp hung out in LA rock haunts with Cage and their mutual friend Charlie Sheen, getting together with local musicians to play what he called "loud, raunchy blues". But the chance to finally bury his TV image did not come through music.

Johnny Depp was 25 when he met John Waters, who was then casting 'Cry-Baby' (1990), a gently sardonic take on early rock'n'roll mores. Waters wanted a hip young actor who could subvert a youth audience, and after researching the market - which meant buying lots of teen magazines and feeling, by his own admission, "like the world's biggest child molester" - he settled on Depp. The actor received $1 million for his performance, remarking, "If they want to give it to me, I'll have to take it" with the nonchalance of someone whose fondness for out-there roles in somewhat marginal movies would, from then on, never prevent him from banking $4m a pop for making them.

Next came Tim Burton, another director with a mile-wide absurdist streak. Having lost his original choice of Tom Cruise for the central role in 1990's 'Edward Scissorhands' - after refusing Cruise's request to end the film by giving his hero fingers - Burton, like Waters, made full use of Depp's desire to escape his milquetoast past. The end result was an accomplished fable about the purity of the loner and the cruelty of the mediocre. Depp, given to reminiscing about his and Burton's shared ardour for the "raw power one can find in a velvet Elvis painting", publicly eulogised the man he quickly adopted as a svengali, routinely seeking his advice on future projects. Slightly thrown when Burton offered him the lead in 'Ed Wood' (1994), Depp called on Waters for a second opinion.

The die was cast. In comparison with the rather muted commercial and critical response to 'Cry-Baby', 'Edward Scissorhands' scored a hit with the critics and at the box office. Depp, playing opposite his sweetheart Ryder, was taken to the hearts of America once again, this time as a real-life Edward Scissorhands: an enigmatic naïf, all mischievous charm, doe-eyed vulnerability and latent sexual potency. For the next five years, in the eyes of the world - and perhaps more importantly his own - that was what Johnny Depp did. That was who Johnny Depp was: everybody's favourite nutbag.

Not that the films he was in weren't good or, if not, that his performances weren't uniformly astute. While his obvious talent was captured in its best light during 'Ed Wood', and 1993's 'Benny and Joon' and 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape?' - in which he starred, presciently, as Leonardo DiCaprio's elder brother - he was also the best thing in the respectively messy, badly-executed and downright ill-conceived 'Arizona Dream' (1993), 'Don Juan De Marco' (1995) and 'Dead Man' (1996). It was just that, as Depp frantically crafted a new identity for himself from the ashes of Tom Hanson, he was inadvertently obscuring his abilities as an actor.

Rather than downplay comparisons to his characters, Depp chose to highlight them. "I'm attracted to the people who are considered freaks," he told journalists while modelling a sailor's cap emblazoned with the nickname he thought up for himself, Mr Stench. "Since I was young I've identified with characters considered by 'normal' society to be outcasts and oddballs."

He took to peppering his interviews with the sort of disingenuously wacky bon mots that cemented the perfect story of Johnny Depp, class clown. "If someone were to harm my family, I would eat them," he would say, or, "I'm scared of boogers. If someone ever showed me a booger, I'd smash their face in." Depp was in his early thirties when he made both of these remarks, as he was when declaring apropos of nothing in particular that "breasts are back in" and while ruminating over "the fascination of feet". When he was asked what the three small black boxes tattooed on his ring finger meant, Depp said he didn't know. "Somehow they mean something to me. I don't totally understand it yet. I think I will some day."

His childhood would come under scrutiny whenever he was in this kind of mood: "I even remember feeling like a freak when I was five" and "I was a weird kid" and "I was a shy kid", and so on. The transience of his early years regularly cropped up in conversation. "We were gypsies," he informed one reporter, which is slightly melodramatic given that his family didn't move again after they arrived in Miramar in 1970. "After a while I thought, I'm not going to introduce myself to the other kids any more. You have this nagging sense that something's wrong, that you have no roots."

From non-conformist, it was a short step to rebel. Ever since Mickey Rourke's turbo-charged freefall from A-list to 1991's 'Harley Davidson And The Marlboro Man' (and beyond), a vacancy had existed within the Hollywood machine for the position of bad-boy-in-residence. The paparazzi-baiting Sean Penn had appeared to be Rourke's heir apparent, but proved unwilling to exploit his brief notoriety. All anyone had subsequently been able to rustle up to play black sheep was Christian Slater. But as soon as Depp arrived, toting his wrong-side-of-the-tracks routine, the tabloids adored him.

Just like those he gave on screen, it was a great performance. Photographs from the time show Depp pouting, cigarette in hand, dressed in proto-grunge apparel, his tattoos in shot, occasionally accompanied by evidence of the self-mutilation he said he carried out "to mark certain periods in my life". More often than not the text concerned the string of spurned fiancees (Ryder, 'Dirty Dancing's Jennifer Grey and 'Twin Peaks' Sherilyn Fenn) who inspired one of the most popular early-'90s bumper stickers: "Honk if you haven't been engaged to Johnny Depp". No longer a 'Tiger Beat' pin-up, he became a 'National Enquirer' centrefold.

Constructing a myth is one thing; dealing with its reality is another. The Viper Room nightclub, of which Depp became part-owner in 1992, was supposed to be a place where Johnny could meet with fellow members of his particular celebrity sub-strata. Sometimes Iggy would drop by, or Flea from the Chili Peppers, or Robert Downey, or Nic Cage, or erstwhile Sex Pistol Steve Jones. It was supposed to be somewhere to hang out, to jam with Johnny on guitar or to enjoy an after-hours drink. It wasn't meant to be somewhere you came to inject a speedball and die. Which, in October 1993, is just what River Phoenix did.

"He wasn't unhappy that night," Depp says of Phoenix, perhaps the closest thing he had to a genuine peer. "He arrived with his girlfriend and his guitar. You could cut me open and vomit in my chest, because that kid..." He pauses. "What a beautiful thing that he shows up with his girl on one arm and his guitar in the other." For Depp, that was what being a bad boy was all about: hooking up with your girl, then going out to play some tunes with your friends. Dying at 23 wasn't part of the deal.

He went to pieces. Discussing it now, Depp slips into the third person. "Oh yeah, Johnny was unhappy then," he recalls, slowly, hesitantly. "It was a pretty dark time for me. I don't know what was going on. Well, I was poisoning myself beyond belief. There was a lot of liquor. A lot of liquor. I was pretty unhealthy." He still hasn't seen 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape?', made in between the drinking, and says he never will. "It was such a sad time for me," he shrugs. "I can't."

On 14 September 1994, a funny thing happened to Johnny Depp. At 5am, ensconced with his new girlfriend Kate Moss in the $500-a-night Mark Hotel, East 77th Street, New York, he was inadvertently dragged into a violent and destructive incident. "I'll tell you what happened," Depp says earnestly. "I was sitting on the couch in my hotel room, when a really big dachshund jumped out of the closet. I felt it was my duty to retrieve this animal, so I chased it for 20 minutes, but it wouldn't cooperate. Finally it dived out of the window. And there I was, stuck with the evidence."

The evidence in question was a couple of broken chairs, a damaged table and a mangled lamp. With no sign of the dachshund, he was charged the same morning at Manhattan Central Booking Court with 'criminal mischief'. It was the perfect rap for Johnny Depp: essentially innocuous, verging on the quaint. He walked after writing a cheque for $9,738 to pay for the damage, but not before his arresting officer iced the cake by commenting that he hadn't recognised the inebriated Depp because he had "looked like a bum".

The tabloids went into a frenzy. "Wild man" Johnny Depp had been arrested for "trashing" a room at the "trendy" Mark Hotel, with anonymous "friends" observing that "Johnny likes whiskey on the rocks - and when he drinks it, he drowns in it!" Emerging from court to find a phalanx of cameras on the street outside, Depp was asked for a comment. He asked for an aspirin.

After his release, he flew to London to appear on 'Top of the Pops', tormenting an unamplified guitar behind Shane MacGowan on the singer's latest single 'That Woman's Got Me Drinking'. The perennially tired and emotional MacGowan was just one of the expanding collection of musicians with whom Depp had started to surround himself. Aside from the Viper Room crew, he'd glad-handed Evan Dando, Noel and Liam Gallagher and the Butthole Surfers' Gibby Haynes. He and Haynes formed a band, P, then made a short film together entitled 'Stuff'. Shot on Steadicam, it consisted of a ten-minute tour around the house of John Frusciante, abstract artist and former guitarist with the Chili Peppers.

He talked about making a biopic of Jack Kerouac, having become obsessed with the Beat writer during the making of 'Arizona Dream'. Vincent Gallo, his co-star on the film, remembers "Emir (Kusturica, the film's director) and Johnny carrying around Dostoyevsky and Kerouac books, wearing black. They had never worn black in their lives."

Depp was reportedly delighted after spending several thousand dollars on Kerouac's overcoat, one of many examples of what could either be regarded as part of the admirable self-education of a high-school dropout or money-no-object cultural tourism. He bought art (including the clown paintings of gay serial killer John Wayne Gacy), travelled to Paris to stay in the room where Oscar Wilde died and waived his usual fee to appear in Jim Jarmusch's 'Dead Man'.

But Depp himself seemed to recognise the need to move on. To grow up. 'Dead Man' was the first time his own notices bordered on the tepid. Perhaps in response, he made John Badham's 'Nick of Time' (1995), still the closest he's ever come to a conventional action flick. Though the result, with its engaging McGuffin of unfolding in real time, was actually as 'interesting' as any of his other work, the movie tanked and in Britain went straight to video.

Vincent Gallo, not a man known to mince his words, seemed to sum things up. He liked Johnny Depp - the real Johnny Depp - but the actor's "tragedy", he said, was this: "The exterior - the TV pop star turned bad boy/waif/lover/hipster/friend of Jim Jarmusch - is totally uninteresting." Gallo seemed to articulate a growing undercurrent of popular opinion. Depp's public face suddenly looked rather old.

America grew up on cowboys and Indians. In a recent poll asking US citizens who their role model was, John Wayne was the most frequently mentioned. Native Americans remain a profoundly touchy subject for Hollywood and the country as a whole. Not, unsurprisingly, for Johnny Depp, himself a Cherokee descendent.

'The Brave', Depp's self-produced 1997 directorial debut, was not about Jack Kerouac or John Frusciante's bathroom. It centred on Raphael, an alcoholic American Indian trying to provide for his family after his release from prison. In despair, he accepts an offer of $50,000 to star in a snuff movie. Depp played Raphael after persuading another of his gurus, Marlon Brando, to appear alongside him. Unfinished, the film was invited to Cannes. Rushing to meet the festival's deadlines, Depp arrived in Europe with what was essentially a rough cut.

The first people to see 'The Brave' were critics, most of them American. "At the press screening, the film was applauded," Depp explains. "They were very nice about it. They seemed to enjoy it. So I'd experienced this great thing - I was welcomed into the fold, I was accepted as a filmmaker and my film was applauded." In print the next morning, however, the collective verdict was rather different - indeed, one reviewer said he found the film "tedious and self-indulgent". Depp left Cannes feeling "bashed about, brutalised and savagely penetrated".

'Fear and Loathing' director Terry Gilliam is one of the few people to have actually seen 'The Brave', which is still without a distributor in the US or the UK. "There's no way it deserved the treatment it got," he says. "I've seen far worse films made by far more experienced people. Basically, Johnny just got eaten alive." While there's no evidence to suggest it was consciously orchestrated, the vitriol aimed at 'The Brave' - and by implication its director - looked a lot like the revenge of every hack Depp ever snubbed and every producer he'd ever turned down.

Somewhere between his subject matter and his naivety, the oft-told tale of Johnny Depp, Hollywood outlaw, threatened to become a dark reality. Depp redeemed himself with two of the best performances of his career. 'Donnie Brasco' (1997) wasn't the first biopic he'd ever done - 'Ed Wood' had seen to that - but kitsch icons were a world away from Joe Pistone. Pistone was a complex character, an FBI agent who went deep cover with the Mafia for five years, gaining the Mob's trust before turning over his 'friends' to the authorities. He wasn't the kind of outsider Depp usually played - Pistone was a man on the margins because he was a walking ethical crisis.

An unsentimental, fiercely intelligent film, 'Donnie Brasco' saw Depp displaying emotions he'd never shown before - paranoia, rage, doubt. Yet he also showed a constant, quiet restraint that gave his co-star Al Pacino, as Pistone's unwitting Mob dupe Lefty, plenty of space. By way of comparison, 'The Devil's Advocate' (1997) showed what happens when Pacino works with a young actor who has none of Depp's finesse, in this case Keanu Reeves. The results were very, very ugly.

Spring 1997. Having completed the second encore of a set lasting just over 90 minutes, Oasis leave the stage of Manhattan's Hammerstein Ballroom. After it becomes clear the band will not be returning to continue their performance, the audience of 4,000 predominantly young, affluent New Yorkers begin filing towards the exits. Then, as the house lights come up, around 50 people begin cheering. A moment later, another group, about the same size, joins the ovation. Soon about half the crowd are standing with their backs to the stage, applauding as a figure in the balcony shuffles towards a door surrounded by security guards. Before disappearing behind it, Johnny Depp, girlfriend Kate Moss beside him, turns to acknowledge the acclaim.

'Fear and Loathing', predictably, fared dismally in the States, its boorish carnival of drug abuse and bad behaviour drawing censure from the critics and completely bewildering audiences more used to Nancy Reagan's sermonising than Hunter S Thompson's Swiftian wit. Depp's performance - rather more than the straight 'Stars In Their Eyes' impression many took it for - went largely unpraised, although British audiences may well be more impressed by his character's subversive moral shading.

Terry Gilliam keeps telling Depp that he should move to Europe - where he's currently filming 'The Ninth Gate' under the direction of Roman Polanski - but Depp still lives in the $3m mansion in the Hollywood Hills once owned by Bela Lugosi. When he first moved there in 1993, producers furtively left scripts on his doorstep, scripts for exactly the kind of movies he always passed on. You wonder if he gets offered those scripts any more, the 'Armageddons' and the 'Saving Private Ryans'. You wonder if he's still trying so hard to distance himself from all that - and it looks as though he is.

"He's 35, he's growing up," Mike Newell remarks. "When you meet him, you're meeting someone of whom your mother would approve. He is, quote-unquote, a nice boy. And that makes a very bad story. Hellraiser who hangs around with supermodels and habitually plays all sorts of loners and wildmen is a much better story. But it isn't the truth."

Johnny Depp, who split with Moss earlier this year, has stopped looking over his shoulder and is facing the future. "Robert Downey said this brilliant thing," he enthuses. "Someone asked him for the definition of 'hot'. He said 'destined to be old'. That's one of the most brilliant things I ever heard anyone say."

So what then does getting older mean to him? "Disgust," says Depp. "Disgust and chronic self-awareness."