The Libertine

page 24

! There May Be SPOILERS in the movie reviews !

If you happened to have Johnny Depp standing naked in front of you, he wouldn’t need to say a word to tell you about his life. It would all be there, etched into his part-Cherokee skin: the 11 tattoos that cover his arms and fingers and torso, homages to his loves and obsessions. There’s the one of “Betty Sue”, his mother; “Lily-Rose”, his six-year-old daughter, over his heart; “Jack”, his three-year-old son, on his forearm; “Wino Forever”, which used to read “Winona Forever” until he broke up with the actress Winona Ryder. Then there are the welts and scars from the self- inflicted knife cuts and the fights. If you know how to read it, Depp’s body is his story, like an old Cherokee rug or an aboriginal painting: the dreamtime of Johnny Depp.

And, fully clothed, as he is in front of me today, there are more clues: the silver skull rings given to him by Iggy Pop, one on each hand; the silver cross around his neck; the heavily scuffed work boots he always wears; the brown leather strap on his right wrist — some of the accumulated fetishes of his life.

Yet, perversely, Depp, who is now 42, has insinuated himself into our consciousness not by revealing himself, but by masking himself in strange and fantastical guises: the tormented man-child Edward Scissorhands; Ed Wood, Hollywood’s worst but most optimistic movie director; Roald Dahl’s strangely disturbing Willy Wonka; the manic Hunter S Thompson; the mysterious JM Barrie in Finding Neverland; and the louche Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, for which he got his first best-actor Oscar nomination.

It is only now, in his latest film, that Hollywood’s most reluctant star, finally at ease with himself, has been prepared to strip away the masks. In The Libertine, based on the hit play by Stephen Jeffreys, Depp gives a performance that is as close as he has ever come to playing himself, or himself as he once was — as John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester, the great poet and playwright of Restoration England, and one of the most scandalously dissolute rakes in history. It is directed by Laurence Dunmore, and John Malkovich, who also produced, plays Charles II (with a delicious prosthetic nose). Samantha Morton is the actress Mrs Elizabeth Barry, with whom Rochester falls in love.

The film is dark and smelly and absolutely filthy — in every sense. Depp plays the decadent earl, who died in the horrible agonies of syphilis at the age of 33, with such furious abandon and seductive intensity that it has to be the most dangerous and thrilling performance of his career. Indeed, the film has been sitting on the shelf for a year, as its American distributors have fretted over how to present it to the prudish domestic audience. Yet Depp’s performance should banish any doubts that he is the most powerful and versatile American film actor of his generation. The power comes from what the performance reveals about Depp, not what bits of actorly business he hides behind. It is The Portrait of Johnny Depp as a Young Man.

The actor himself says it is a part he is happy he didn’t try to play a decade ago, when it was first mooted. Back then — until he caught a glimpse of the French actress and pop star Vanessa Paradis across the lobby of the Hôtel Costes in Paris, in 1998, and was “ruined”, as he puts it — he had been living the life of a modern-day libertine.

“To play Rochester, it needed me to be on a solid foundation: a couple of kids, my girl, a simple life, understanding where I am in the world,” he says. “Then, I would have missed the point. I would have tried to live the part. That would have been a mistake.

“Early on in my research, I thought the guy was an absolute hedonist, but I was wrong,” he says. We are sitting in the standard Beverly Hills hotel room provided for such meetings, and he is alternately scratching his wispy beard or dragging on a hand-rolled cigarette. When he smiles, it is with the disconcerting gold gnashers of the pirate Jack Sparrow: Depp is in the middle of shooting the two sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean in the Bahamas. “Rochester was a guy who felt too much, and if you go back through history, up to today, you’ll find these hypersensitive guys — Shane MacGowan, Jack Kerouac, Hunter Thompson — and that was the route they found to numb the pain: self-medicating to avoid thinking about what was actually happening.”

Since he met Paradis — they spend much of the year with their two young children on a small farm near St Tropez — Depp has grounded himself in a much simpler life than he ever dreamt he would find. It took him a long time to get there. For many years, deeply conflicted about his growing celebrity, Depp, like Rochester, Kerouac and his late friend Thompson, “self-medicated” — in his case, with neat bourbon and pills and pot. He burnt through a serial harem of beautiful and troubled girlfriends, including Kate Moss, Winona Ryder, Jennifer Grey and Sherilyn Fenn. He trashed hotel rooms. He attacked the paparazzi with two-by-fours when they intruded. He spent nights in jail. Close friends such as River Phoenix died around him. Nobody in Hollywood would have been surprised if, like Rochester, Depp had died in his thirties. Even he acknowledges that “there were times when it was a wonder I survived”.

The thing is, Depp never planned to be an actor. He comes from a working-class family in Kentucky, who moved to Florida when he was young, never settling anywhere for more than a few months. He says that they may have moved 30 times before his father finally left, when Depp was 15. To deal with the pain of his family’s often violent troubles, he pretty much locked himself in his bedroom for a year when he was 12 and taught himself to play a $25 electric guitar that his uncle, a preacher, had bought him, learning from records his older brother turned him on to: Van Morrison, Dylan, Aerosmith and, later, the Clash and the Ramones. His brother also turned him on to Jack Kerouac.

Thus inspired, he dropped out of school when he was 16. His band, the Kids, had some minor success, opening for his hero, Iggy Pop. By the time he was 20, he was in Hollywood, married to a make-up artist, crashing on the floor of the actor Nicolas Cage, his wife’s former boyfriend, and telemarketing pens to survive. Cage suggested he try acting, and he quickly landed roles in the horror movie A Nightmare on Elm Street and Oliver Stone’s Platoon.

It was being cast as the lead in the television series 21 Jump Street, however, that kick-started his career. Depp played a teenage high-school cop, a kind of hip David Cassidy, and he hated everything about it. Most of all, he hated feeling he was a commodity. He managed to get out of his seven-year contract after four and began to find more fulfilment in the offbeat film roles he took. They reflected his deep unease with his celebrity. He often played characters — Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, even Hunter Thompson — who retained an innocence and purity that Depp sensed he had lost.

“For a number of years, I self-medicated because I couldn’t quite figure it out,” he recalls. “I thought a simple life was an impossibility. I thought I was just destined to be ‘novelty boy’ until I wasn’t ‘novelty boy’ any more. ‘Didn’t you used to be Johnny Depp?’ It flipped me out. It was a weird period.”

Weird indeed, exemplified by his arrest in 1994 for trashing the New York hotel room he was staying in with his then girlfriend, Moss. (Depp defends her in her recent troubles, saying he is “appalled and shocked at the kind of vicious attacks” on her in the press. He said much the same after another troubled former girlfriend, Ryder, was convicted of shoplifting.) Depp later claimed — channelling William Burroughs — that he had smashed up the hotel room because “there was a bug in the place that I was trying to kill. This thing had tried to attack me and tried to suck my blood — a big cockroach”.

However amusing it might be in retrospect, Depp’s friends and family were becoming increasingly concerned about his “self-medicating”. In the early 1990s, they staged an intervention, warning him that he was killing himself. For a while, he stopped everything, which made it even more devastating when Phoenix died of an overdose outside the Viper Room, the hip music club in Los Angeles that Depp part-owned.

As confused as he may have been, Depp had succeeded in completely befuddling Hollywood. He clearly had the potential to be a huge star, yet the studios couldn’t figure out why he had walked away from sure-fire hits such as Speed and Legends of the Fall. Between 1989 and 1998, none of his films grossed more than $55m in America, yet almost all are interesting. It was only in 2003, when he put on his most deliciously obscuring disguise — the gold teeth, the kohl- encrusted eyes, the beaded hair, the oddly effete mannerisms — as Captain Jack Sparrow that he truly became a big international movie star. At first, however, top Disney executives were horrified by his portrayal.

“Disney gave me such a hullabaloo about what I was doing with the character, the teeth, all the beads hanging and the dreadlocks,” recalls Depp, who had partly based his characterisation on the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards. “I would get these phone calls from upper echelons, team Disney, and it would be like, ‘Okay, okay, what are you doing with your hands? Is he drunk? Is he gay? What is he?’ From what I understand, Michael Eisner (the Disney chairman) hated it so much that the words actually came out of his mouth, ‘He’s ruining the film.’ Which really killed me, of course — it made me laugh. Bless him.”

Of course, the rest is history. One of the biggest hits in Disney history, the film took more than $650m worldwide at the box office and now its two sequels are being shot back-to-back, with Depp said to be earning more than $20m for each one. Oddly, he doesn’t seem uncomfortable with his new superstardom — mainly, I think, because he has created, in Captain Jack, the kind of timeless character his children can love.

Although Depp travels with his family, as he sits today dangerously close to what he laughingly calls “the beast of Hollywood”, you can sense his palpable nostalgia for France and the life in which he has finally found himself.

“France has given me the opportunity to live a basic and simple life with my kiddies, a life of normalcy,” he says. “The nearest village has 1,500 people. I can take a ride into the village and go to the little local bar and have coffee with my girl, and people say, ‘Hello, Johnny, how are you?’ I’m not looking round the periphery for the paparazzi. You drive back home and walk in the vegetable garden with your kids and have a nice lunch — you know, real life, real life, not any of the hoopla that surrounds the industry here.”

Let’s hope he gets back there soon.

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