Doing It Depp's Way

Monday, Mar. 15, 2004 By JOSH TYRANGIEL
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Hollywood agents don't get pity. They get 10%. But spare a kind thought for Johnny Depp's agent, Tracy Jacobs. For more than a decade, her client--one of the world's best actors and best-looking human beings--has consistently turned down glamorous leading-man roles in large, profitable movies so that he could play a chorus of memorable (to those who saw them) character parts, like Cesar, the Gypsy horseman in The Man Who Cried, or Bon Bon, the Cuban transvestite prostitute who smuggles prison contraband in his rectum in Before Night Falls. Only Crispin Glover's representatives have suffered more for their percentage.

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"Tracy's taken a lot of heat over the years," says Depp. "She has bosses and higher-ups, and every time I take on another strange project, they're going, 'Jesus Christ! When does he do a movie where he kisses the girl? When does he get to pull a gun out and shoot somebody? When does he get to be a f______ man for a change? When is he finally going to do a blockbuster?'"

In 2003 Depp did his blockbuster, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and earned Disney $305 million. His Captain Jack Sparrow didn't kiss or shoot anybody, and he kind of sashayed through most of the film, but Pirates proved that with the right material, Depp can be a huge multiplex draw. His long-suffering agent didn't want him to take the part. "He was pitched the movie without a script," recalls Jacobs. "They basically said, 'We're going to make a movie out of this theme-park ride. Want to do it?' And he said, 'Great! I'm in. I believe in the idea.' I just thought, What idea, you lunatic?"

Now that he has blockbuster status and a surprise Screen Actors Guild award, prestige scripts are piling up on Depp's doorstep. He reads them--"You kind of owe it to the writer, I think," he says--but he has no plans to try to fashion them into any kind of sensible mainstream career. Why start now? "Nothing changes," says Depp, who is in Wales shooting The Libertine, in which he plays the Earl of Rochester, a 17th century poet and pornographer who reportedly died of syphilis. "The challenge for me is still to do something that hasn't been beaten into the moviegoing consciousness. Otherwise what am I in it for?

The dough? Well, the dough is cool, but I don't want to be 85 years old and have my grandkids go, 'Ewwww. Grandpa did some dumb s___.' I'd rather have them say, 'Wow, man, you're nuts!'"

As proof of his willingness to be thought insane, Depp's first post-Pirates movie is Secret Window, in theaters this Friday. He plays Mort Rainey, a successful writer being stalked by a psychotic dairy farmer. Before the movie ends, for reasons too crucial to the plot to fully explain, Mort manically consumes the equivalent of Iowa's annual corn harvest. But that's not the crazy part. "Much of the first half of the movie is just Mort in a cabin by himself not doing things," says Secret Window's writer-director, David Koepp, a man you would expect to have a vested interest in making the movie sound a bit more dynamic.