Johnny Depp: 1996 Playboy Interview

Johnny Depp looks rotten. Or so he says. The women on Sunset Boulevard would surely disagree. Many of them would marry him on the spot. But then Depp seldom bows to majority opinion. As he lights another cigarette and drinks more coffee at a bookstore café on Sunset, his attention flits to a bee—a killer bee encased in Lucite. It's one of many oddball souvenirs he receives from friends and admirers. Bugs are serious business to Depp, who collects exotic paraphernalia. His career—the other subject under discussion at the table—is taken more lightly. Acting, he explains, is nothing but "making faces for cash." Others take his work more seriously. Depp is "one of the great young actors," says European director Emir Kusturica. Marlon Brando, Vincent Price and Faye Dunaway have said the same. Brando says that Depp should do Shakespeare, while Dunaway claims he is both a superb actor and a super kisser. The on-screen Depp is the world's greatest lover; offscreen he's a famed romancer of actresses and supermodels. "He doesn't belong in show business," his Ed Wood co-star Sarah Jessica Parker once remarked. "He belongs somewhere better." Lasse Hallström, who directed him in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, says, "He has real ambitions, but he is deeply afraid of being considered pretentious."

And one other thing: He looks great in a dress.

At 32, Johnny Depp is entering the heart of what he calls, with casual self-deprecation, "my quote-unquote career." His is a goofy oeuvre, perhaps most impressive because he's carved a unique niche without making a box office hit. Thus far, the Kentucky-born Depp has made misfit movies. He was a boy monster in Edward Scissorhands, top-hatted oddball in Benny & Joon, keeper of a retarded brother in What's Eating Gilbert Grape and the unsinkable cross-dressing director in Ed Wood. Nobody plays human frailty like Depp. Even though he made women swoon in Don Juan DeMarco, he played the fabled lover as a committed loon.

His new films are John Badham's Nick of Time, a thriller in which he plays an accountant turned assassin, and Dead Man, an eerie Jim Jarmusch Western that is scheduled for release later this year. Even after opting for Dead Man over the slick epic Mobsters, a choice that cost him millions of dollars, he was criticized when he signed to star in Badham's thriller. Industry watchers thought he was doing "the Keanu thing," forgoing his traditional quirky roles for a commercial blockbuster. But for Depp, Nick of Time is no typical action flick. It's one of the first films since Hitchcock's Rope to tell its tale in real time, each screen minute equaling 60 seconds of his character's strife. And it's his task in the film to gun down a female governor. Still, thriller is as thriller seems, and if the film is a hit, Depp will probably be charged with cynicism.

That's one crime he has not committed. Drug use and hotel abuse, perhaps, but not calculation. Which may be why Depp made the difficult transition from teen hunk on TV's 21 Jump Street eight years ago to film star. Along the way, he has escaped the trivia heap by making brave, eccentric movie choices. Imagine David Cassidy as Gilbert Grape. Picture Kirk Cameron as an assassin. Or better yet, consider Richard Grieco, Depp's megacool Jump Street co- star, as a name anyone would recognize.

Depp can be equally defined by the roles he didn't take. He reportedly spurned Keanu Reeves' part in Speed, Brad Pitt's role in Legends of the Fall and Lestat in Interview With the Vampire. Of course, Tom Cruise played Lestat—a neat twist, because Cruise is said to have refused the role of Edward Scissorhands because Edward, while cutting edge, wasn't handsome.

Depp says he respects Cruise but has no interest in "the Tom Cruise thing"—box office godhood. He can now command $4 million per film but often takes far less for pet projects, including his friend Jarmusch's Dead Man. He has danced to his own drummer since his 1984 debut in A Nightmare on Elm Street, in which he got sucked through a bed into hell. Along the way he has fallen for some of America's most desirable women. He has had offscreen relationships with Jennifer Grey (Dirty Dancing) and Sherilyn Fenn (Twin Peaks). A rumored liaison—public, if not pubic—with Madonna was followed by a notorious engagement to Winona Ryder and the requisite tattoo, WINONA FOREVER. When they broke up, he had the tattoo removed a letter at a time; at one point it read WINO FOREVER.

Today he and his latest love, übermodel Kate Moss, are the prom king and queen of young Hollywood—beautiful, thin chain-smokers with an air of sex and tragedy. Or call them, thanks to their morbid humor, the new Gomez and Morticia. Johnny once made a shrine in his movie-set trailer, placing candles around a photo of Kate with a bride of Frankenstein hairdo.

Their hangout, the Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard, which Johnny co-owns, was the scene of River Phoenix' fatal overdose in October 1993. The horror of that Halloween has faded, and today's Viper Room more than ever resembles its owners: notorious and nice. "It's a fun place again," he says, passing the strip of cement where Phoenix died, "but you never forget."

Depp is all about his past. In 1970, when he was seven years old, his family left Kentucky for Miramar, Florida, where the Depps moved from house to house and sometimes lived in motels. Depp's father took off when Johnny was 15. His mother, Betty Sue, worked as a waitress, and Johnny counted her tips after work. He also developed a fierce devotion to society's outcasts. In high school he was suspended for mooning a teacher. Shortly after that he dropped out and worked pumping gas. Once, trying to learn to breathe fire like circus performers, he blew a mouthful of gasoline at a flame. His eyes lit up as the blaze raced toward him—then his eyebrows and hair lit up, too. He barely escaped.

To "get an identity" (and meet girls) he joined a band. He played guitar with the Kids, a group that was good enough to open for the Ramones, the Talking Heads, Iggy Pop and the B-52s. They went to Los Angeles to make it in the big time but flopped instead. Depp needed work. That's when Nicolas Cage, a pal from the music scene, said, "You should meet my agent."

Depp auditioned for director Wes Craven. Legend has it Craven's daughter, with whom Depp ran lines that day, fell in love with the new kid in town. He won a role in Craven's Elm Street, which led to Private Resort, a 1985 teen sexploitation pic in which his bare butt played second banana to then-unknown Rob Morrow. Next came stardom.

As a narc on 21 Jump Street, Fox TV's first hit, Depp became a poster boy to female teen America. He hated every minute of it. As soon as he was free of his contract, he spat on his Jump Street image by starring in John Waters' spoof Cry-Baby.

The grungy offscreen Depp is fascinated by the macabre. He is a student of the nether zones of biology and the extremes of abnormal psychology. (He recently bought Bela Lugosi's old house for $2.3 million.) He collects skeletons, paintings of scary clowns and, as mentioned, bugs. As with his work, there is a twitchy humor to his collectibles, his conversation, even his arrests. They're all funny if you view them as he does—as brief excursions on our common march to the graveyard. In 1994 he was jailed for trashing a $1200-a-night suite in New York City's Mark Hotel. Handcuffed and led by police to a sidewalk jammed with reporters demanding his reaction, he nodded toward the cops and said, "I've met some really nice people." Is Depp a nice person? We decided to send Contributing Editor Kevin Cook to find out. His report:

"Johnny Depp often runs late. To him, a watch would be a handcuff. So I was pleased when he showed up less than an hour after the time we had arranged. He shook my hand and apologized, saying he had run his motorcycle into a pink Ford Escort.

"He led me into the quiet, dark Viper Room—black walls, mirrors, black upholstered booths. The booths are marked with brass plaques engraved with the names of preferred guests and a warning to interlopers: DON'T FUCK WITH IT. The place was empty in the early afternoon. We went downstairs to Depp's sanctum, where we sat on a couch near a closed-circuit TV that monitors the club above. We talked all day. I was impressed by his intelligence and earnestness. He was often tongue-tied, struggling to shoehorn his convoluted thoughts into sentences. Watching him grope for words, I couldn't help rooting for him to unearth the mots justes he was trying for.

"A minor point: Depp's Viper Room co-owner, Chuck E. Weiss, who happens to be the eponym of Rickie Lee Jones' song 'Chuck E's in Love,' has joked that Johnny is such an artistic, sensitive person that he 'sits on the toilet and pees like a woman.' But it's not so. We did about a minute of this interview in their club's men's room, and I can assure you he's a stand-up guy."