Exploring the friendship of Johnny Depp and Hunter S. Thompson
One of Johnny Depp‘s most beloved roles is from 1998’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a project in which he portrayed the acclaimed gonzo journalist and writer Hunter S. Thompson. Depp had already been a fan of Thompson’s for some time, and even before taking on the role, the two had become friends, with Depp once saying, “It was a love affair, a major love affair that hung around until he made his exit.”
The two first met in 1994 when a meeting was set up at the Woody Creek Tavern in Aspen, Colorado. The iconic writer had bought a house in the town back in 1967 and even ran for sherriff a few years later, with his pledges, unsurprisingly, to legalise drugs and preserve the natural environment.
In typical Thompson fashion, upon meeting Depp in the bar, he entered in a calamitous fashion, bringing a taser with him to make his way through the crowd. Depp remembered (via Daily Record), “The front door opened, and all I could see were sparks, just shooting everywhere, and people jumping for cover. You could hear this sort of muffled ‘Out of my way, you bastards!’, and then the sea parted, the sparks stopped, and he arrived in front of me.”
Depp continued: “He said, ‘My name is Hunter; how do you do?’ And that was it, really. From then on, if we were apart, we were on the phone constantly.” Indeed that was the moment at which the two heroes in their fields forged an unbreakable bond that would see them rely on one another, whether for advice or to get up to no good.
A “rite of passage” occurred that same night when Thompson invited Depp back to his Owl Farm property. Depp had been taken by Thompson’s 12-gauge shotgun hanging on the wall. Not only did Thompson ask if Depp wanted to shoot it, but he also built him a bomb to blow up made out of propane tanks and nitro-glycerine.
Throughout their friendship, Depp and Thompson’s escapades included pissing on Depp’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star with Marilyn Manson, partying with sex dolls at Depp’s Viper Rooms club, heading to Cuba to interview Fidel Castro, and likely all manner of other drug-fuelled benders.
However, despite the suspected chaos, the friendship was also one of love and caring too. Thompson helped Depp prepare for his role in Fear and Loathing and made sure he was sleeping and eating right whenever he came to stay in Aspen, checking he was alright when tripping on LSD together. Depp returned the love by urging his friend to publish The Rum Diary in 1998, which he had written in the early 1960s, but did not think was much good.
Following Thompson’s death by suicide in 2006, his good friend Depp was responsible for organising the scattering of his ashes. However, Thompson’s last wish was something of a “practical joke”. He wanted to be fired out of a cannon in his backyard along with fireworks to the sound of Bob Dylan’s ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’.
Depp remembered the moment: “Now, there were no giant cannons of the right size – he wanted 150ft of cannon – and then I found out that the Statue of Liberty was 151ft tall. I thought, ‘Well, he would really hate me if it was smaller than the Statue of Liberty’, so we built it up to 153ft and broke records. And so the great joke is that we were all forced to focus on something else, as opposed to the loss of a great, great friend.”
One of Depp’s greatest roles was playing his dear friend, not only in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but in The Rum Diary too. The two pop culture icons shared an eternal bond that not even death can end, especially due to the lasting influence of Depp’s iconic portrayal of him.
