The career-destroying movie Johnny Depp only made on one condition: “I pulled the fucker out of retirement”
The most valuable stars in the industry have the greatest amount of say over the movies they choose to make, although Johnny Depp probably wishes he hadn’t bothered after issuing an ultimatum that became the first domino to topple in the series of events that effectively ruined his mainstream Hollywood career.
After landing the first Academy Award nomination of his career for playing Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Depp had suddenly been transformed from the eccentric darling of American independent cinema into an A-list superstar, a path he never had any intentions of following.
Still, it would take an actor of the highest moral standing to turn down tens of millions of dollars every time the script for a fresh blockbuster landed on their doorstep, so like many of his peers, Depp embraced his newfound status and became the highest-paid name in the business bar none.
It may not sound fair to single out one film as the beginning of the end, but it’s hard to argue with the facts. Before The Rum Diary was released in October 2011, Depp was flying higher than ever: his previous four credits were Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and Pirates sequel On Stranger Tides – both of which cleared a billion dollars at the box office – along with the Oscar-winning Rango and smash hit The Tourist.
After The Rum Diary, the flops kept coming. Dark Shadows, Transcendence, The Lone Ranger, Mortdecai, and Alice Through the Looking Glass all bombed spectacularly hard, and it probably shouldn’t go unmentioned that the film was also where Depp met Amber Heard. As a Hunter S Thompson adaptation, the star felt obligated to make the film to honour his late friend, but there was one condition.
Writer and director Bruce Robinson had helmed one of Depp’s all-time favourite features in the classic comedy Withnail & I, but he hadn’t taken the reins on a feature in over a decade. Undeterred, the leading man and producer was adamant that it would only happen if he checked a key item from his bucket list by working with the person who made a movie he’d adored for decades.
Depp had been attached to the project since the late 1990s and never gave up on his dream of making it a reality. “It’s been there for so long,” he told Vanity Fair. “So, yeah, I made this film before I made it.” What he didn’t have was a director, and there was only one name on his list. He sent a copy of Thomson’s novel to Robinson with a request to try and hammer it into a script, and in his words: “I pulled the fucker out of retirement.”
What they ended up with was a critical bust, a box office bomb, and in the long run, a movie that signalled the start of Depp’s downward slide, one that ultimately culminated in his Hollywood exile. For a while, at least.
