The “bizarre” acting trick Bob Dylan stole from Johnny Depp: “It’ll help me do the scene”
Many musicians have taken a crack at acting, and while artists ranging from Cher to Kris Kristofferson have proved that they’re multi-talented, the same can’t be said for the likes of Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan, although the latter has hardly made it very far as a Hollywood star. He might be one of the most important folk singers of all time, but when it comes to cinema, he has left an interesting mark on the medium.
While he has appeared in various well-received documentaries about himself, including the 1967 film Don’t Look Back, he starred in a movie that he also penned in 2003 called Masked and Anonymous, using the pseudonym Sergei Petrov. Perhaps he shouldn’t have let slip that he was actually Petrov, because the film was not good at all.
He managed to get a large and star-studded cast to appear in the film – after all, if Bob Dylan asks you to be in his film, you star in his film. So, everyone from Penélope Cruz to Val Kilmer to Jeff Bridges and Angela Bassett can be seen in the movie, with Dylan playing a musician named Jack Fate. Write what you know, I guess.
Interestingly, Dylan didn’t enlist Johnny Depp into the cast, even though the actor seems to be a friend of all famous musicians. Yet, his presence can still be felt in the way that Dylan approached his performance, which confused director Larry Charles. Talking to Uproxx, the filmmaker revealed that during the filming of a certain scene, “I’m hearing music in the background and it’s very distracting”.
He added, “I’m asking people, ‘Do you hear that music?’ Everybody hears it and it’s like, ‘Where’s that coming from?’ People are scrambling around the building, and they’re running outside to see where this music’s coming from.”
In the end, Charles realised that they were looking for the culprit when he was right under his nose. Getting closer to Dylan, he realised that the sound was getting louder. “And I’m like, ‘He really is a musical genius! He’s emanating music!’ And then I realise he’s got a bug in his ear and the music is coming out of this bug in his ear. And I go, ‘What are you doing?’ And he points to the bug, and he tells me the name of the song — ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ or whatever it was — that he was playing. And I was like, ‘You can’t do that during the scene.’”
Dylan had learned some techniques from acclaimed star Depp, and he didn’t think there’d be any trouble in using them for himself. “He said, ‘Johnny Depp told me that I should play music during the scene. It’ll help me do the scene.’ And I’m like, ‘Johnny Depp did not tell you that! It’s very distracting. We’re hearing it everywhere. You can’t even hear what you are saying right now because the music is blasting in your ear.’”
Yet, when you’re Bob Dylan, you probably think you can get away with anything. He didn’t even consider how distracting the music could be, nor did he bother to consult anyone about it first. The filmmaker added, “It took me 20 years before I finally read that, indeed, for some bizarre reason, Johnny Depp really does play music in his ears while he’s doing his scenes. So these were the different things Bob did to approach his performance.”
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