Doing It Depp's Way

• Share

(2 of 3)

Depp claims he was riveted by Koepp's adaptation of Stephen King's novella--and the movie does pick up to become a Misery--meets--The Shining kind of thriller. But it was the character's inactivity that really hooked him. "It's always great to get in the ring with actors you respect," Depp says. "But when you're in there by yourself, it's quite challenging. You're not reacting, which is mostly what acting is. Instead, you just have to be. There are scenes where it's like two minutes of just scratching the tablecloth. That interests me." He took the movie to scratch a tablecloth? "I'm not really sure why he wanted to do it," says Koepp. "I'm grateful, but it's hard to be certain of what motivates Johnny. It's possible he just wanted to play a character named Mort."

The whimsy that drives Depp's career springs from his early days as an actor. It is easy to forget that he was the Ashton Kutcher of his era, the hot young star of a mediocre show on Fox. "I wouldn't say [21 Jump Street] was misery because it was a privileged opportunity. But it was very, uh ... uncomfortable," says Depp. So desperate was he to get out of playing Officer Tom Hanson, a dreamy high school narc, that Depp says he made like M*A*S*H's Corporal Klinger, dressing up in odd clothes and speaking in tongues on the set in hopes of getting out of his contract. The producers didn't bite. "It was a weird thing not to be in control of your own image," he says. "I remember saying to myself, Man, when I'm free of this, I'm going to do only the things that I want to do. I'm going to go down whatever road I decide."

In addition to choosing scripts based on his own internal logic, Depp decided that once he got jobs, he wouldn't worry too much about keeping them. "All the amazing people that I've worked with--Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman," he says, "have told me consistently: Don't compromise. Do your work, and if what you're giving is not what they want, you have to be prepared to walk away." Or get canned. Depp came perilously close to being fired from Pirates of the Caribbean when his melding of Keith Richards and Pepe Le Pew freaked out a few senior Disney executives. "It has actually happened a number of times," Depp says. "At the end of the first take on the first day they say 'Cut,' and then ... silence. I mean silence that's deafening. And you're constantly waiting for the knock on the door--'Uh, Johnny? It's not gonna work, man.' But what are you going to do? It's only a movie."

This nonchalance is no act. Depp enjoys being in movies, and he says he enjoyed attending the Oscars, but he saw none of his fellow nominees' performances and guesses the last movie he saw was Pirates--and only because he had to. "I like not knowing what's happening out there--who's doing what, how they were, what the box office was," he says. "Even when I'm in the soup bowl of Hollywood, I just play Barbies and hang out with the kiddies."