When Michael Madsen thought Johnny Depp’s acting prowess was overrated: “It was lifeless”
Johnny Depp’s career has had its ups and downs, but there’s no denying that he has turned in some pretty impressive performances over the years. Sure, there are a few things that a person could do to redeem themselves from a film like Mortdecai (a highly-publicised libel trial isn’t one of them), but before his career took a downturn in the 2010s, Depp was sometimes hailed as his generation’s Marlon Brando.
There were naturalistic performances like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? and Blow, and eccentric performances in movies like Edward Scissorhands and Pirates of the Caribbean. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the actor was one of the most popular stars in Hollywood, and even critics seemed to enjoy his work.
However, there was one co-star who was neither impressed by the young actor nor shy to make his feelings known. In 1997, Depp starred opposite Al Pacino in the Mafia movie Donnie Brasco. In it, he plays an FBI agent who goes undercover to infiltrate the family of one of the mob’s most prominent members (Pacino) and finds himself getting caught up in their world and growing more distant from his own.
It was met with rave reviews when it was released, especially for Depp’s performance. One of his co-stars was less impressed. Michael Madsen played Sonny Black in the film, one of the key mafiosos and Pacino’s close associate. He enjoyed working with Pacino, but was supremely underwhelmed by Depp.
In an interview with fellow actor Stephen Baldwin, Madsen said, “I don’t get it” when the actor’s name was brought up, and went into great detail about why he found Depp to be a non-entity as an actor. “It just didn’t work for me,” he said of his co-star’s performance. “There’s no way that guy would’ve been let into the family.”
When Baldwin asked him whether he ever thought that Depp was terrible at acting when they were doing scenes together, Madsen replied without hesitation, “Yeah. It wasn’t terrible, it was just boring. It was lifeless. There was a lifelessness to it that I couldn’t comprehend. It made no sense to me.”
Some of his disgust for the actor may have had something to do with their off-camera relationship. Madsen recounted a story about how some of the actors in the film who were playing the tough guys wanted to pull a prank on Depp and enlisted Madsen to push the actor into his changing room with a battery-operated plastic rat and lock the door. It didn’t go down well, apparently.
Madsen also claimed that he went to Depp’s nightclub, The Viper Room, after the film was released and got beaten up by a mysterious man while visiting the toilet. As a bouncer escorted him out of the building, Madsen claimed that the man said, “Johnny wanted me to tell you that he thought you loved him.”
“I don’t know what that meant,” Madsen said. That’s unfortunate, because if that brawl and Depp’s forlorn message were true, there are clearly two very different sides to the story, and Depp’s version might be even more entertaining. Not surprisingly, the two actors have never worked together since then.
