How did Tim Burton meet Johnny Depp?
It’s hard to imagine Johnny Depp’s career as an actor today without director Tim Burton, and the same goes for Burton’s work behind the camera. Burton is the filmmaker who turned Depp from the teen idol of the TV show 21 Jump Street to the magnetic big-screen oddball we know today.
The two have collaborated on a total of nine movies, including eight of Burton’s outings as director. Most famously, they worked together on bringing Burton’s own character Edward Scissorhands to life in the 1990 gothic cult classic, and on the highly unusual biopic of even more unusual Hollywood filmmaker Ed Wood.
It was the former movie that led to the initial meeting between Depp and Burton, as Burton was looking for a versatile young actor to play the titular role opposite Winona Ryder. Scissorhands would go on to launch the 27-year-old Depp’s career on the big screen as he cast off the shackles of his televisual typecasting.
But casting a virtual unknown in the world of cinema wasn’t an easy decision, and it certainly wasn’t the preference of film studio 20th Century Fox. Not many directors would have taken a punt on Depp, either.
How was Depp cast as Scissorhands, then?
Remarkably, although he hadn’t watched Depp’s previous acting work, Burton wrote in his autobiography a decade later that the actor was always his first choice for the role of Scissorhands. The studio tried to impress Tom Cruise, their director, while other actors up for the role included John Cusack and a young Jim Carrey. But Burton was insistent – he wanted Depp.
“I’d never seen the show he’d done, 21 Jump Street, but I knew about him,” he later told Jonathan Ross. “And after I’d met him, I realised he was that character. He’s always been misperceived by looking like a poster boy, and inside there was always something different. And that’s sort of what the character of Edward Scissorhands was.”
Ironically, Depp thought exactly the same thing about Burton when the two first met. “I flew to Los Angeles and went straight to the coffee-shop of the Bel Age Hotel,” the actor wrote in the foreward to Burton on Burton, “and BANG! I saw him sitting at a booth behind a row of potted plants, drinking a cup of coffee.”
He was initially taken aback by the director’s unkempt appearance. “I remember the first thing I thought was, ‘Get some sleep,’ but I couldn’t say that, of course.” And then he began to notice Burton’s unusual mannerism.” The hands – the way he waves them around in the air almost uncontrollably, nervously tapping on the table, stilted speech (a trait we both share), eyes wide and glaring out of nowhere, curious, eyes that have seen much but still devour all. This hypersensitive madman is Edward Scissorhands.”
Unsurprisingly, the two hit it off right away, and Burton knew he’d found his man for the starring role in his new movie. “It was one of those rare experiences where you meet somebody and you connect with them as a person and as an artist,” Burton later recounted. Surely the closest thing the film industry has ever experienced to love at first sight.
