Johnny Depp has left a trail like none of his contemporaries. While he may not have received awards with the same profusion as some of his Hollywood peers, his filmography presents him as one of the finest character actors of our time.
As well as being a Hollywood heart-throb, Depp is also known for his rock ‘n’ roll attitude, reports Far Out Magazine.
As a youngster, Depp had dreams of making it big in showbiz, but his aspirations lay within the realms of music. He left school at 15 to pursue his aspirations as the singer and guitarist for the rock band, The Kids.
By the early 1980s, Depp was struggling to make ends meet with his musical exploits failing to take flight, but his fortunes changed when he befriended actor Nicolas Cage.
As Cage became better acquainted with Depp, he saw trends that could shape him into quite the actor. “He was at the point in his career where he was selling pens or something to get by,” Cage recalled in a conversation with the New York Times Magazine in 2019.
“He would take my money and buy cocktails but wouldn’t tell me about it. He admitted it later. But anyway, we were good friends, and we would play Monopoly, and he was winning a game, and I was watching him, and I said, ‘Why don’t you just try acting?’”
Depp was sceptical of the idea and protested, saying he couldn’t act. “I said, ‘I think you can act’,” Cage continued. “So I sent him to meet with my agent. She sent him out on his first audition, which was A Nightmare on Elm Street. He got the part that day. Overnight sensations don’t happen. But it happened with him.”
By the mid-1990s, Depp had become a Hollywood A-lister and a prominent feature of teenage bedroom walls. While his acting exploits forced his musical side to the background, his rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle seemed to make up the difference. Whether mingling with the Gallagher brothers or being cuffed on contentious accusations, Depp managed to uphold his status as the bad boy of Hollywood.
Much like Keith Richards, on whom Depp based his Pirates of the Caribbean character, Depp’s bad boy side appears to have been blown out of proportion by the media. Despite his victory over former wife Amber Heard in court earlier this year, we will likely never know exactly how cruel or violent Depp might have been behind closed doors.
What we do know, however, is that Depp has shown himself to be a true – if a little eccentric – on several occasions over the years. Most famously, Depp upheld his promise to Hunter S Thompson, his friend and character study for 1999’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. As agreed prior to Thompson’s suicide in 2005, Depp spent $3 million to fund the funeral, during which the journalist’s ashes were fired from a giant cannon.
Depp told the Associated Press at the time, “All I’m doing is trying to make sure his last wish comes true. I just want to send my pal out the way he wants to go out.”
In another act of kindness and loyalty to the deceased, Depp once donated an entire film’s salary to Heath Ledger’s daughter.
Following his outstanding appearance as the Joker in Chris Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Ledger began another project, Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. In 2007, Ledger began working on the film alongside co-stars Depp, Colin Farrell, Jude Law and Christopher Plummer, but sadly, he died from an accidental prescription drug overdose in January 2008, leaving the project in a tricky state of limbo.
As Gilliam struggled to find a route for the movie without one of his leading characters, Depp, Farrell, and Law offered a hand to see it through to completion. The film was eventually squared off with Ledger’s limited appearance, and in a final moving act of generosity, Depp, Farrell and Law donated their entire earnings from the movie to Ledger’s daughter, Matilda, who was just four at the time.
