by Johnny Depp
Playboy: A few years later he played a supporting role in Cry-Baby. Did he remember you?
Depp: No. He said he didn’t remember much from those years.
Playboy: Pretty soon after that you went out west with the band.
Depp: We got bored in south Florida. We had to move to Los Angeles to make it big. I remember the drive out. Driving 18 hours at a stretch, you hit a kind of hallucinatory state of sleep deprivation that sends you into orbit. You blink and look up and you’re driving into the devil’s mouth. It was a good time. You have high hopes because you’re not thinking of yourself as a self but as a band member, that great camaraderie. Then, before you know it, you’re on your own.
Playboy: But the band shattered on contact with the big time?
Depp: We broke up, and I couldn’t lean on the drummer or the bass player anymore. It was all me. I had to deliver.
Playboy: So what was your first step?
Depp: I sold pens.
Playboy: On the street?
Depp: It was marketing—working the phone from a big stuffy building in Hollywood, near Hollywood and Vine. The best thing about that job was using the phone—I’d call my family in Florida on the pretext of selling them pens. The boss, the pen boss, would circle the room, but when he went by I’d say, “How many pens would you like, 288? Two gross?” After he passed I’d whisper, “Mom, are you there?” The free phone calls were fine, but the sales pitch was a batch of lies. Telling people they could win a trip to Greece or a beautiful grandfather clock. So I learned my pen-selling script—it was really my first acting gig—and then ad-libbed. I actually sold some pens. But I felt so bad lying that I began telling people, “Don’t buy the fucking pens. The grandfather clock is made of corkboard.”
Playboy: Ending your telemarketing career. Fortunately, you had a friend, Nicolas Cage.
Depp: We became friends through music when I was in the band. He had already done Valley Girl, Rumble Fish and Cotton Club, so I knew him as an actor. But I wasn’t planning to be one. We just hung out.
Playboy: At the parking garage of a local mall?
Depp: That’s the story. We were messing around one night at the Beverly Center, having a giggle. We may have been drinking. We were goofing around, and the story is that we wound up hanging by our fingers five stories up on the parking structure. I don’t remember, but I’m thinking we did.
Playboy: It seems that there’s something particularly postmodern about daredevil acts at a mall.
Depp: It was the ultimate death-defying white-trash act.
Playboy: Cage arranged to get you a tryout for Elm Street and you were well on your way.
Depp: But even after that first movie I never thought that there would be others. I didn’t necessarily want there to be. I wanted to play my guitar. But with the band broken up, I needed rent money. I needed cigarettes.
Playboy: After Elm Street you moved to 21 Jump Street. You reportedly detested the show that made you famous. Did you really think 21 Jump Street was “fascist”?
Depp: Sure it was. Cops in school? I mean, bad things happen in schools, but this was even worse than cops in school. It was preachy, pointing the finger. And it was hypocritical because the people running that show, the very highest of the higher-ups, were getting high. They were getting loaded. And then to say, “Now kiddies, don’t do this” was horseshit. I was miserable living that lie for three years. Mortified. I was getting loaded, too. Am I really the one to say, “Don’t get high”?
Playboy: Did you try to get out of your contract?
Depp: I offered to do a year of the show for free. I hate sounding like, “Oh, I’m on television and they’re paying me a load of money, poor me,” but I would have done two years for free to get out of there. They were trying to turn me into Menudo, into the New Kids on the Block. I couldn’t play that game. I would rather shrink back into everyday life than get stuck being that.
Playboy: You must have enjoyed being America’s dreamboat at least a little.
Depp: Not for one day. To enjoy lying? Enjoy being a piece of a machine, the product of a huge assembly line? No. And fighting the label of heartthrob is hard, too. By then I wanted to be an actor, and that was impossible on TV.
Playboy: Jump Street got you invited to the Reagan White House.
Depp: Yeah, for a Just Say No event. That was the biggest joke of all. But I took my mom and she loved it. We watched all the people—everyone acting so proper, trying to get close to the president. We were desperate for coffee, but there was no coffee allowed, no caffeine. People were putting away the booze, though. We had a laugh.
Playboy: Is your mother a movie fan?
Depp: She doesn’t talk much about my movies, though she knows when I’m real, when it’s me at my most honest. She can sift through whatever horseshit I might have thrown in there and find that. I took her to the premiere of Don Juan and we talked later. It was in the anger, the flare-ups, and some of the sad moments when she could see me.
Playboy: Is she proud?
Depp: Sometimes she still looks at me and says, “God, can you believe your life? Going from living in a motel to all this?” She’s still a little shocked. So am I. I’m probably more shocked than anyone. Being able to earn money making faces, telling lies! When it all started about eight years ago, she was still a waitress. People, customers, would say, “You’re Johnny Depp’s mom!” and she’d be all proud. Then it took a turn, and now it’s more uncomfortable. Whom can you trust? Who’s real and who’s just smiling? I think she’s getting tired of it.
Playboy: You’ve publicly ducked questions about you and Brando, saying the two of you have never discussed acting.
Depp: We have talked about it. I think he feels compelled to tell me about his experiences, to offer advice. He has said I should play Hamlet, for one thing. What I remember are scenes we had in Don Juan. There are times when you’re trying to get somewhere inside, but there’s so much stuff going on around you—the guy with the clapboard, the grip over there drinking coffee, the director going “action”—that you’re just not ready. He was there for me then. He helps create an atmosphere that makes those moments easier. Even if it’s just by laughing, talking, looking at you. He helped make scenes between the two of us totally private.
Playboy: Sounds romantic. Did he moon you, too?
Depp: [Laughing] A couple of times. I mooned him back.
Playboy: Seriously, Brando-wise—
Depp: All the feelings are there: teacher and student, father and son. He’s a hero.
Playboy: Were you jealous when he kissed Larry King on TV?
Depp: He did kiss Larry King, didn’t he? I think it was sweet. Maybe I should be jealous because I didn’t kiss Larry.
Playboy: You have another passion: collecting odd things. What’s the latest?
Depp: There’s a bug store in Paris off the Boulevard St. Germain. I love snooping around in there. I recently bought a gift for a friend, a bug that looks shockingly like a leaf. The veins, the coloring, all perfect. If this guy were in a tree, you couldn’t find him with a microscope—and that, to me, is a miracle. How could evolution attain that disguise? Insects are fascinating. You could never wipe them out. They’re too fucking tough and too smart.
Playboy: What else? Do you collect shrunken heads?
Depp: In Lima, Peru I bought an enormous, beautiful bat and two dozen lacquered, stuffed piranhas. Coming home through Customs was funny. “What’s in the box?” “Oh, 24 piranhas and a bat.” “OK, strip-search this guy!”
Playboy: Do you own anything that is ordinary?
Depp: I have a lot of pictures that kids have sent me. They are some of the best things—little kids really identify with Edward Scissorhands, and they send me great, pure-genius pieces of art. Paintings of Edward, some of Sam in Benny & Joon—kids
like Sam, too. They like the fairy tales. I frame some of those and put them on a wall in my house.
Playboy: You also had a painting by serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Why?
Depp: I’m fascinated by the dark and the absurd. I’m drawn to what’s behind that. And don’t we all have a bit of the ambulance chaser in us? The Gacy painting is one he did in prison. It’s of Pogo the Clown, a character he used to play at neighborhood get-togethers, family functions. Now, most people believed that Gacy was a pillar of the community, a normal businessman, even as he committed those horrible murders. I suppose what intrigues me is that even after he was caught and put in prison, he was painting this other image he had of himself—the nice guy who played the clown.
Playboy: Do you think he believed the nice-guy image?
Depp: I think he did, but he was driven by his sickness. Anyway, I got rid of it. I paid more than Gacys were going for and naively believed the money went to the victims’ families, which wasn’t true. I gave the thing away. I didn’t want it around anymore.
Playboy: What else gives you the creeps?
Depp: I used to have a nightmare that I was being chased through bushes and fronds by the skipper from Gilligan’s Island. I don’t know what was on his mind, but it wasn’t good and I didn’t want anything to do with it. As a kid I was also afraid of John Davidson.
Playboy: The TV crooner?
Depp: Yeah. I’d see him on television when I was younger, and it was that thing that scared me—the smile that was always there. The Man Who Always Smiles. That was frightening because it’s not real. You knew he might have been feeling like shit, might have wanted to kill somebody, but this was his persona, to smile. And it’s not just him. That thing is everywhere.
Playboy: Politicians—
Depp: Every politician is John Davidson. Eight out of ten producers are John Davidson. I know directors and loads of actors who are John Davidson.
Playboy: How about you? Have you ever been a Davidson?
Depp: [Nods] There are times when you put on a smile. It’s a fucking drag, but you mask your feelings because there’s nothing else to do. For instance, you’re giving an interview and the guy says, “How are you?” You can’t say, “I feel fucking rotten, I don’t enjoy this shit and I would really like to strangle you.”
Playboy: Uh-oh.
Depp: Strangling is an extreme example. But here’s a John Davidson spot—being a presenter at the Academy Awards. I did that in 1994. I haven’t seen it, but people tell me it went OK. My face was probably frozen in fear, because there’s a weird marionette artificiality to those things. Backstage all I could think was, How do I get out of this? I absolutely almost fled. I had a few options swimming around in my brain. Just collapse, fall over unconscious, that was one. Projectile vomiting. Another option was to tell the truth. Just say, “Before I introduce Neil Young I want to say that I don’t know why I’m here. I don’t want to be here. I just want to go have a drink. I feel nervous and a little bit sick.” Of course, I wasn’t actually going to go out and say that. But what was really eating away at me was this: What if I suddenly get Tourette’s syndrome? What if I go out and start barking and saying motherfucker to the whole world?
Playboy: But you did introduce Neil Young and get out of there safely.
Depp: That was a good cigarette after that.
Playboy: Wasn’t there a time you had a quasi-Tourette’s episode on a plane?
Depp: Flying from L.A. to Vancouver for that television show [21 Jump Street]. I was in first class and something came over me. I was already shaky about the flight when it hit me—you have to shout something shocking. Blurt something, or horrible things will happen.
Playboy: So then you yelled, “I fuck animals!”
Depp: Yeah.
Playboy: And, indeed, the plane didn’t crash.
Depp: It worked.
Playboy: You even faced down your fear of John Davidson, didn’t you? He played a talk show host in Edward Scissorhands.
Depp: I had nothing to do with that. It was strange to work with him after years of being afraid of him. He was doing Oklahoma! somewhere at the time and he had a perm.
Playboy: How John Davidson of him.
Depp: So I got rid of that demon. It was a weird exorcism. We talked about his perm.
Playboy: You’ve had other demons. There was a guy who kept calling around town insisting he was you. He said you were an impostor who had stolen his identity.
Depp: Sick. Scary. It was like the ultimate Dungeons & Dragons game, and I was the enemy.
Playboy: He called the studio demanding the money he had made for Scissorhands. That was funny to a lot of people. Was it funny to you?
Depp: It makes you think. I’ve had other threats, too, and what hits you is that these people believe they’re right. They can justify their hatred of you because in their world, you are the enemy. It makes you rethink your job when you realize you can affect someone so intensely. So to me, they’re not evil.
Playboy: Stalkers and kooks aren’t evil?
Depp: They think their hate is justified.
Playboy: How can you sleep?
Depp: I’m cautious but not really paranoid. I carry a gun. Not today, but when there are threats I carry a gun. I grew up around them and I can shoot a little. I could never kill an animal, but I always liked target practice. Now I have a couple of Winchesters, a couple of .380s and a .38. Because basically, who wants to have a bunch of bodyguards? I don’t see myself with that kind of star treatment. I’d rather bounce around on my own. But at the same time, when there’s someone out there who actually wants to take your life, you should try to be ready.
Playboy: Being stalked must darken your view of human nature.
Depp: I never had the brightest view of human nature. I think humanity—society, at least—is violent. It’s not getting any better. I don’t think I’m cynical, but I do think maybe the world is more…sinful than ever before.
Playboy: Does that feeling find its way into your work?
Depp: It must. It’s a sense that the world is harsh to some people. Harsh, judgmental and wrong.
Playboy: Your movie misfits often fight back in funny ways. There’s a story that you insisted on filming an alternate line in Benny & Joon at the climax of the love story.
Depp: That’s true. It’s right when the music comes up and he looks into her eyes. The line is, “Joon, I love you.”
Playboy: And your line was—
Depp: “Joon, I’m a bed wetter.” I’m still passionate about that line. I didn’t get away with it, but I think it could have gotten a laugh and been touching at the same time. You can’t help laughing at the pain of this poor bastard, but he’s honest. And more than that…it’s easy to say “I love you.” The audience expects it. But to say you’re a bed wetter, to reveal something like that, is saying I love you. It’s saying I really love you, enough to tell you my deep, dark secret.
Playboy: Do you have a favorite date movie?
Depp: Wuthering Heights with Olivier is a real tearjerker. Or Mike Leigh’s film Naked. You won’t forget that one.
Playboy: How does porn affect you?
Depp: I like a porn film now and again, but I don’t go out of my way to see one. I saw Edward Penis Hands. Tim Burton sent me a copy. It is a great film, really funny. As for most of it, I suppose it’s arousing to some people, but I get a little embarrassed watching people fuck. You’re sitting there watching and suddenly it seems so strange—the image changes in your mind and they’re not people anymore. The guy looks like a dog, making horrible faces. I’m sure there are beautiful porn films, artistically made. I just don’t want to see that guy.
Playboy: How about love scenes in your own films? Are they arousing?
Depp: I’ve never done a love scene that was arous
ing. The atmosphere is too ridiculous. You’re lying there kissing some girl, professing your undying love, and you see that grip over there eating a bologna sandwich.
Playboy: You’ve never had a boner on-screen?
Depp: Oh, I may have had a boner, but not in a love scene.
Playboy: You’d better explain.
Depp: Who knows what goes on underneath the table, outside the frame? I may have a feather duster down my pants. It’s not necessarily sexual, either. If I’m having a difficult time with a scene, getting too serious, I like to take a handheld duster or maybe a wrench, shove it down my pants and play the scene that way. Any object that doesn’t belong—it takes your mind off the seriousness of the situation. Just when you’re bursting into tears you realize there’s a dust mop in your shorts.
Playboy: So there are multiple tracks in your head. One’s in character while another is sending out dust mop alerts.
Depp: Yeah, and the other actor knows, too. That can add spice to the scene. I’ve used tools, fruit, a little squeegee that creates the sound of flatulence. It doesn’t have to be in your pants, either. In a close shot where they cut you off at the elbows, say, I may have a banana in my hand, or some guy’s shoe.
Playboy: This from the man Brando wants to play Hamlet. What else can you tell us about acting?
Depp: Sometimes you hate it. So maybe you say, Yeah, I make faces for cash, I tell a few lies. And in a way that’s right. In a way it’s just a gig like any other job. Except it’s more unstable, maybe worse for your mental health. If you’re doing what you should be doing as an actor, you won’t be very emotionally stable. You are constantly manipulating your emotions, fucking with yourself, fucking with your self, opening drawers in your head that you don’t really want to open but you have to, to maintain access to them.