It seems that a "press-free" sojourn was earned. As the star of the late-'80s TV series 21 Jump Street, Depp possessed the small-screen power of a born-again Elvis. He typically received 10,000 squealy letters per month (plus the occasional pubic hair). His mail was stolen as a sacred object. Hyperstimulated 13-year- olds lined up several hours in advance for his appearances.
Depp consistently tries to be polite. He offers cigarettes, sugar for coffee. He asks considerate questions: "So, are you completely weirded being in LA?" But his impatience with the star shit' - and with the journalists who fuel it - is palpable. "When reporters can't think of what to report on they look back and find all this other stuff," he says. 'And then they just keep on repeating it so it becomes like this stupid game."
Having said this, however - as he seems to do when he says anything negative, about anyone - Depp retracts his statement. He respects that people, even reporters, have their jobs. He doesn't want to speak about people "in an unfair way. But in the case of reporters, he is justified. Many do tend to get it wrong. Depp, 30, is not a semiliterate wild man. He is, on the contrary, shy and prone to "don't-look-at-me" squirming. And he can’t imagine why anyone would write to him, "a mere actor". Despite the cheekbones and the unaffected pout, Johnny Depp was not cut out for teen-drama stardom. He seems far more comfortable in disguise (today, as the scarecrow of Oz). He likes to blend in, to observe (today, two fat insurance salesmen sharing a 30cm-high hot dog platter). He enjoys playing real people. Troubled people. The "unbeautiful". This preference helps to explain the Depp resume: a list of credits regarded by some as 'eclectic' and by others as a mystery. First there was Cry-Baby, the high-camp parody of '50s teen culture. Next he played Edward Scissorhands in make-up so heavy he was unrecognisable. Soon, he’ll be seen by Australian audiences in Benny & Joon, as a dyslexic who falls in love with a schizophrenic. He has already completed Arizona Dream, a surreal comedy with Jerry Lewis and Faye Dunaway, and What's Eating Gilbert Grape? co-starring Juliette Lewis, about a small-town boy with a slow-witted brother and a mother who weighs 220kg.
Now Depp is preparing to shoot Ed Wood, another film from Edward Scissorhands' director Tim Burton, about a transvestite director who befriended the ageing Bela Lugosi in '50s Hollywood.
"For Benny & Joon, I needed someone who could play a character who is, metaphorically, an angel,' says Jeremiah Chechik, the film's director. "Someone who could achieve a real naive innocence that would not come off as foolish ... I define a movie star as someone who makes it hard for the viewer to turn away. Johnny is a star. But,' comments Chechik, "he chooses parts based on personal and artistic considerations, not 'What would the public say?...
'Hey,' Depp says, hoping to clarify. 'I don't have an allergy to leading man things or kind-of-commercial movies. It just feels good that I haven't taken a route that should have been planned out for me - that I could fight the labels." Then, because we are already on to the career thing" he agrees to get all the standard background stuff out of the way. What Depp, with a brief table-top drum roll, calls "the facts". If you don't know them already ...
He grew up in Miramar, Florida, where his father, a city engineer, moved the four Depp siblings (two girls, two boys; Johnny the youngest) from Kentucky, when Johnny was seven. He had no film heroes as a child, although he liked the TV show Hogan's Heroes.
When he was 12, his mother, a waitress, bought him an electric guitar for $25. Johnny took it and "just locked' myself in my room with my guitar and records for two years". He emerged an alienated teenager - but a musical one. He'd sneak into bars, play gigs with local bands and launched himself into a precocious (and much-chronicled) run of sex, drugs, 'yeah and sloppy rock-'n-roll".
At 16, he dropped out of school and within a year formed his own band, the Kids. The Kids became popular; they opened for the B-52's and Talking Heads and, in 1983, they left Florida for Los Angeles and the LA club scene. Depp recalls this time in his life as 'hard, loud, a lot of drinks'.
But within six months all that had changed. Depp had been married briefly to musician Lori Allison, and Allison was friendly with a young actor, Nicolas Cage, who suggested that Depp, then 20, meet his agent. The agent sent Depp, who had never even seen a script, to read for A Nightmare Ox Elm Street, and Depp was cast as "yes, the boyfriend!'. Depp then left the band, did his first interviews ('l felt so stupid") and made a second film in 1985, Private Resort, with Northern Exposure's Rob Morrow, which he describes as 'a paycheck thing". His first real work, as he sees it, came in Platoon, for which he spent "two weeks in the jungle in the Philippines. just living there - in dirt holes'. Despite a much-edited part (he played the translator), Depp began to think of himself as a professional actor. He read plays and scripts. He turned down a lot of TV work, including 21, Jump Street. He waited. When nothing materialised - and the actor cast in 21 Jump Street dropped out - Depp reconsidered the TV job.
For three,-and-a-half years, he played tough but lovable undercover cop Tom Hanson, until, he says, 'I'd had enough. They didn't want to go anywhere else. I kept saying, how big is our jurisdiction? We're going into these schools. At one point isn't someone going to say, 'Hey, you were in that other school?' How many years could this happen realistically? They were like, 'It doesn't matter."'
During one hiatus, he filmed Cry- Baby. "I had to find a perfect teen idol,' says director John Waters. 'I went through a zillion teen magazines and, well, I just felt there was nobody better than Johnny. It's ironic, of course, that it changed things for him. 'That was really the end of the teen-idol craze."
Except that he continued to receive the usual offers - "the gun-totin’ guy" as he describes it. ""Kiss the girl. Fight a coupla guys. Superhero stuff.' And he was still bound, for a season anyway, to continue in 21 Jump Street. But Depp had evolved a very different vision of himself. And certain directors, Tim Burton, for one, began to see it. Or at least to perceive in him something unusual; an ironic sense of humour coupled, oddly, with a childlike quality.
When Depp talks about Edward Scissorhands (always as "Edward") he talks a lot about innocents, specifically children and dogs. He based his performance on a dog because Edward reminded Depp of dogs he'd had ... That rapid eyeball doggy thing. 'The unconditional love thing. It's rare when you're able to start from the ground up that way. Create someone who's not really human."
Back in the real world, we move on to the Depp residence, up a steep vertical "S" of LA’s Canyon Road. Its defined by its high altitude and, not surprisingly, by its enormous fibreglass rooster. "I don't know," says Depp, with a shrug. 'I saw it, I had to have it." 'There's a motorcycle, a Porsche, a Chevy ute in the garage. Johnny's sister, Christi, "who helps organise my life" makes coffee in the kitchen. We take a tour of the house, pausing to admire an electric guitar on an old couch; two telescopes; a TV the size of a small European car - although Depp is quick to say that there is no reason to watch it. That there's nothing on except the "surreal" local access channels or very late-night MTV, or old movies.
'The Depp house, by any decorating standard, is delightfully strange. In every room he's hung paintings of clowns - clowns crying, clowns with syringes stuck in their heads, clowns on fire or juxtaposed with skulls. Surrounding them, in frames, are very carefully preserved and mounted bugs; mostly cockroaches. "Bugs," says Depp, 'are so mysterious. We don't know how or what they are. They just are."
Unavoidably, in the bedroom, there is a black-and-white shot of Winona Ryder, tangled in sheets. "Yeah,' says Depp, glancing at it. "She's really pretty. She is." Which is his way of opening and closing a subject he will do anything to avoid.
'Hey. I had nothing but bad luck after talking about this stuff" he says heading off in the direction of coffee fumes. "It became such a public thing. Everyone felt like they were either a part of it or that they had somehow gotten the right to ask me about her. When you're in the bathroom, taking a squirt, and some guy walks up and says, 'Hey! How's Winona?' I mean, Huh? You're there with your Johnson in your hand. It takes every inch of strength not to turn around and pee on him!' Back in the living room, Depp, true to form, apologises for this mini-outburst. He offers to discuss anything else - favourite colour, best screen kisser? He srnirks. Pet hates?
He holds out on the colour and the kisser, but agrees that few things are as horrible as - "ugh, no' - having to watch himself act. To be nice, he agrees to try and sifts through a pile of videos. He chooses a cut from Arizona Dream. 'Then he free-falls back on to the couch, presses the remote control, looks away as his face fills the screen. He lights a cigarette to match the one he has burning in a nearby ashtray. Gets up, sits back down, paces and then begins to talk again.
"Jerry Lewis (his co-star in the film) is exactly what you'd expect - a wacky, nutty-professor guy. Really generous, really warm," he says of the man widely regarded as impossible and sometimes cruel. And Faye Dunaway, who is reputed to be worse? 'Faye has a specific way of working. Its not that she's a bitch ... she's a perfectionist." "Johnny's such a nice boy," says John Waters. "If I worked with him again I'd have to cast him as a serial killer!"
The taped segment ends at last. Relieved, he lights up and inhales sharply.
"So, you do wanna know my favourite colour?" he asks, walking out to say goodbye to his sister. "It is,' he says, pausing, "cobalt blue." He laughs, confesses its not. "But if you can't have a little humour about yourself - what can I say? You're fucked."

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