Johnny Depp’s most hypocritical hatred of Hollywood: “It’s always just made me sick”
Few stars have fallen as quickly as Johnny Depp in recent years, with the actor going from the single highest-paid star in Hollywood to an outsider and outcast in no time at all.
After Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl netted Depp his first Academy Award nomination and thrust him onto the A-list in 2003, he wasted no time on capitalising on his newfound status by signing on for an ongoing string of effects-heavy fantasy flicks where he’d regularly cash cheques that ran into the tens of millions of dollars.
It might have been his highly publicised personal problems and courtroom battles that hastened his exit from mainstream cinema, but the writing was already starting to look as though it was on the wall. Several flops in quick succession had significantly watered down his appeal, and hogging the headlines for reasons that had nothing to do with his onscreen efforts only exacerbated things.
Depp would deny that he’d been effectively kicked out of Hollywood, instead intimating that it was a mutual decision made by both parties. He didn’t need it, and it didn’t need him, or at least that’s the way he told it. In theory, it should have been the beginning of a brand new chapter, only for the ostracised actor to come running the very first time a major American studio project was dangled right in front of him.
That’s highly hypocritical in and of itself, but it’s got nothing on the one thing he hates about his fellow actors. “That whole idea for me is a sickening thing; it’s always just made me sick,” he ranted of stars who use their fame as a springboard to try and break into music. “I’ve been very lucky to play on friends’ records, and it’s still going. Music is still part of my life, but you won’t be hearing ‘The Johnny Depp Band’. That won’t ever exist.”
In his defence, Depp has never started his own band and used his residual fame to draw in a crowd. On the other hand, how many people can honestly say they’d buy a Hollywood Vampires record or pay to see them live if the supergroup didn’t carry the novelty value of having a movie star, Alice Cooper, and Joe Perry as the band’s biggest selling point?
“I hate the idea, ‘Come see me play the guitar because you’ve seen me in 12 movies,'” he continued. “It shouldn’t be. You want the people who are listening to the music to only be interested in the music.” Again, a fair point, but seemingly oblivious of the fact that the majority of folks who’d turn up to one of his gigs aren’t there because he’s Johnny Depp, the musician; they’re there because he’s Johnny Depp, the world-famous actor.
