Johnny Depp’s fall from Hollywood hero to box office zero
If damaging revelations from 16 tumultuous days in court don’t ruin star’s career, a string of flops and lazy acting style might.
In the eerily prophetic highlight of the deeply dopey 2011 movie The Rum Diary, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard drive towards their deaths in a flashy red sports car. She’s playing a femme fatale, he’s an earnest journalist and, as in real life, they have only just met. The breakneck race is her idea of automotive erotica — don’t ask — and within minutes of the drive beginning, through the gorgeous coastal roads of Fajardo, in eastern Puerto Rico, the pair are careering along a jetty, screaming in terror as they hurtle towards the end of everything.
In the film Depp slams on the brakes and skids to a halt inches away from the edge. Yet in real life the newly besotted pair sped onwards, straight off the jetty and into the splashdown hell of a fantastically short marriage (barely over a year), a messy divorce and a libel action (instigated by Depp) that has put the spotlight on the kind of lurid, dehumanising and career-killing detail that no speed-fuelled Hollywood screenwriter could have concocted.
The messy 16-day libel trial against The Sun that finished in London on Tuesday revealed a Beverly Hillbillies parody world where drugs are snorted, whisky bottles fly at faces, hair is pulled, headbutts are apparently delivered, rooms are trashed, fingers are sliced open and messages of doom are written in blood and, when all else fails, expensive bedding is covered in what is arguably human faeces.
Professional suicide
Heard has previously claimed that publicising the details of her volatile relationship with Depp was tantamount to professional suicide. In an article that she wrote for The Washington Post in December 2018, she said that even making accusations against Depp meant that she was dropped from an unnamed movie and fired from a global fashion campaign, and that her fledgling career as a blockbusting heroine was placed in doubt. “Questions arose as to whether I would be able to keep my role of Mera in the movies Justice League and Aquaman,” she wrote.
In addition to his London case, Depp is suing Heard for $70m million for writing that piece (which he claims is based on the central premise that he “perpetuated domestic violence against her"), and is thus preparing for a US-based court case that smacks of sequelitis — Libel II: Because this time it’s (even more) personal.
Career after cocaine dust settles?
The question of whether Depp will have a career after the (cocaine) dust has settled is the issue that looms largest. Hollywood loves, more than anything, the cliche of the comeback and has thus offered resuscitating paths for scandal-hit stars including Winona Ryder (drugs and theft), Rob Lowe (sex tape with a 16-year-old girl) and Robert Downey Jr (drugs and eventual prison time). However, Depp’s case is different. It does not involve a precipitous fall from grace as much as a slow and steady tumble towards infamy that began somewhere in 2012, when the LA Times ran with the headline, “Has America Fallen Out of Love with Johnny Depp?”
Back then it was simply a number-crunching exercise. His movies had stopped making big money. The Tourist had been a flop. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (aka Pirates 4) had performed poorly at the US box office. The Rum Diary was also a flop.
One misstep after another
The article noted that Depp was “involved in seemingly one misstep after another”. And that was before the subsequent megaflops Dark Shadows and The Lone Ranger. The latter forced Walt Disney Studios to take a whopping $264m loss.
Off screen there were signs that the sands of popularity were shifting too. In April 2015, while Depp was working in Queensland on the fifth Pirates movie, his new wife Heard was charged with attempting to bypass Australia’s strict quarantine regulations by smuggling their two Yorkshire terriers, Pistol and Boo, into the country on a private jet. It caused a media furore. There was a whiff of entitlement about it that was pounced on by the Australian agriculture minister, Barnaby Joyce, who announced to the cameras that laws couldn’t be broken for anyone, even if Depp had been voted the “sexiest man alive”. Joyce added: “It’s time that Pistol and Boo buggered off back to the United States.”
Depp soon became involved in a legal dispute with his management company in which the excesses of his opulent lifestyle were revealed. It was then estimated that Depp had made $905m million from his blockbuster roles (including Pirates, Alice in Wonderland and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them).
Mutilmillion-dollar ‘compulsory spending disorder’
The management company claimed that Depp had a S2.7m a month “compulsory spending disorder”, listing purchases that included 70 guitars, 200 pieces of art (including Warhols and Basquiats) and 45 luxury vehicles, plus $278,000 a month on private air travel, $4.1m to shoot the ashes of his friend Hunter S Thompson from a cannon and $104m on 14 homes.
When confronted with another of the company’s claims, that he spent roughly dollars 30,000 a month on wine, Depp replied: “It’s insulting to say that I spent $30,000 ($AU41,000) on wine. Because it was far more.”
At the same time Depp began touring with his latest rock band, the Hollywood Vampires (which includes Alice Cooper and Joe Perry), decrying his acting career and rewriting his personal history as the accidental slide of a serious musician into the Hollywood limelight. When he met the Times rock critic Will Hodgkinson in Copenhagen in 2018, he said that music had been “his life” all along, but that by sheer chance, “the acting thing started to happen” and he couldn’t resist the allure of a pay cheque.
Echoes of hero Brando
This is a variation of the usual Depp schtick. His ultimate hero is Marlon Brando, who had a similar disregard for the acting profession. Depp likes to repeat in interviews an anecdote about how Thompson typed out The Great Gatsby, word for word because he wanted to know what it felt like to write a masterpiece. It’s hard not to see the parallels with Depp’s at times slavish imitation of Brando.
Brando, like Depp, was uncommonly beautiful, from small-town America (Omaha, Nebraska, to Depp’s Owensboro, Kentucky), with an instinctive disregard for convention and an often financially opportunistic approach to screen acting — Brando’s then eye-watering fee of $5,15m for two weeks of work on Superman in 1978 has a touch of the big Pirates money about it. Brando and Depp worked together on the movies Don Juan DeMarco and The Brave. Brando even advised Depp on how, just like him, he could buy his own paradise island (Depp’s is in the Bahamas, Brando’s was in French Polynesia).
There is one key difference between the pair, however. And it may be at the root of everything that’s happened from the moment Depp slipped accidentally on to the screen in the mid-1980s until the last lurid revelation of his recent libel case. Marlon Brando, as an actor, was a genius. Johnny Depp is not.
Watch him in his debut role in 1984, as slasher fodder Glen Lantz in A Nightmare on Elm Street, and he’s excruciatingly stiff. “Next time you’re having a dream tell yourself it’s just a dream and then you’ll wake right up,” he says, blankly, to the heroine Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp). He was not much better after this, during four seasons of the undercover cop show 21 Jump Street, where he was consistently outperformed by his softly coiffured mullet, his two loopy earrings and the light coating of bum fluff that clung nervously to his upper lip.
It was around this time that he appeared to formulate a career plan and began railing against the idea of doing vacuous work and being “turned into a product”. He was briefly effective in Arizona Dream and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (probably his best performance), where he seemed momentarily free and uncluttered. Yet almost simultaneously he discovered the kitsch pleasures of acting for the director Tim Burton and bringing to life DayGlo caricatures that relied more on facial prosthetics and comical vocal cadence than anything approaching psychological realism. Edward Scissorhands, Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow and even his version of Raoul Duke in Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas were examples of an overblown acting style that came directly from kids’ cartoons (Depp would later cite, straight-faced, Wile E Coyote and Pepe Le Pew as influences) and was seen at the time as a popular novelty belonging to Depp alone.
He did other non-cartoonish roles too, but with less impact (Nick of Time, Dead Man, The Ninth Gate). I encountered him several times around that time on the set of Chocolat in 2000 (a friend worked on the film) and observed someone who was innately charismatic, surprisingly elfin in stature, good with a Zippo, and surrounded already by sycophants. Depp arrived on the first day of shooting and announced that he would be delivering all the lines of Roux, his French gypsy character, in an Irish accent. No one questioned it. No one even said: “But Johnny, this makes no sense.” It was simply star power quietly unbalanced.
Going the full cartoon with Captain Jack
He went full cartoon in 2003 with his kiddie-friendly Keith Richards homage, Jack Sparrow, in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Everything changed, the money flooded in (the movies have made $6.2bn at the box office), and he became a blockbusting god and global superstar.
In his private life, there was a short-lived, youthful marriage to Lori Anne Allison, three consecutive engagements (to Jennifer Grey, Sherilyn Fenn and Winona Ryder) and a four-year relationship with Kate Moss. These were followed by a stable, 14-year relationship with the French actress and singer Vanessa Paradis that produced two children. The family were based in homes in Paris and the south of France. Ryder and Paradis, during the libel trial in London, offered supportive statements of Depp’s flawless and gentlemanly conduct during their time with him.
Losing the audience love
Meanwhile, with the exception of his sweetly restrained turn in Finding Neverland, the film performances generally became bigger and more exaggerated (Willy Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland), and audiences lapped them up. Until they didn’t. The box-office death of his Venice-set spy caper The Tourist, in 2010, was ominous. That it became one of the comedic linchpins of Ricky Gervais’s Golden Globes monologue ("I’m jumping on the bandwagon because I haven’t even seen The Tourist. Who has?") and subjected Depp to worldwide ridicule was a taste of future humiliations.
The subsequent flops (Dark Shadows, The Lone Ranger, Mortdecai) brutally exposed the limitations of Depp’s artistry, which seemed to rely on heavy face-paint and a default English accent that recalled classic-era Charles Hawtrey. Pirates of the Caribbean continued to pay the bills, but even the tiresome adventures of Jack Sparrow were running out of steam. The poor fifth instalment, released in 2017, underperformed commercially.
Actor on autopilot
Depp’s appearance in the Harry Potter follow-up franchise Fantastic Beasts was highly contentious. The performance was autopilot Depp (wacky make-up, zany accent — this time David Bowie-lite), but overshadowed by the emerging domestic abuse allegations from the Heard camp, which forced the Potter and Beasts creator, JK Rowling, to release an oddly ambiguous statement about being “deeply concerned” by certain issues, yet sticking with Depp based on her “understanding of the circumstances”.
Depp has since played some low-key characters. He’ll next be seen, for example, as the photojournalist W Eugene Smith in the real-life drama Minamata (I saw it at this year’s Berlin Film Festival and was underwhelmed). The unfortunate truth is that Depp’s technical inadequacies are undeniable. His outre style, for which he became an icon, has fallen out of favour, and he’s been left floundering in an art form for which he now seems ill equipped.
It’s no wonder that he needs a drink, or wants to play pub guitar with some ancient rockers. In a recent interview he spoke about reflecting on his life and his very recent travails while on tour with the Hollywood Vampires. “I kept trying to figure out what I’d done to deserve this,” he said. “I’d tried being kind to everyone, helping everyone, being truthful to everyone. The truth is most important to me. And all this still happened.”
The Times
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