“I had no control over it”: the role Johnny Depp called “horrible”
While every actor fantasises about a breakthrough role that elevates them from unknown to household name in an instant, the dream can often turn out to be a nightmare in the long term, as Johnny Depp discovered when a steady paycheque became a source of constant misery.
He wasn’t exactly wet behind the ears, having already appeared in Wes Craven’s influential slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street in his very first feature film appearance before swiftly following it up with a part in Oliver Stone’s ‘Best Picture’-winning war classic Platoon, but Depp was still relatively anonymous in the mid-1980s.
It’s a position he shared with countless actors across the industry, but when the perfect opportunity presented itself, he ended up growing increasingly disdainful of it. Depp wanted to test himself by working with the best and stretching his dramatic capabilities to to breaking point, which simply wasn’t going to happen in a teen drama.
Not only that, but 21 Jump Street turned him into a heartthrob and idol to millions of impressionable young fans around the world, which he hated with a deep-seated and burning passion. Four seasons and 80 episodes was more than enough, with Depp trying everything in his power to free himself from the misery of a decent-paying gig in a TV series boasting a big audience and solid ratings.
Depp eventually convinced the producers to let him out of his contract ahead of 21 Jump Street‘s fifth and final season, and it wasn’t long before he was vindicated when Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands premiered in cinemas in December 1990 and led to a Golden Globe nomination for ‘Best Actor – Musical or Comedy’, with the gothic fantasy hitting the big screen five months after his last episode as undercover cop Tom Hanson.
Reflecting on that period in conversation with The Guardian, Depp didn’t hold back on voicing his disdain for attaining pinup status. “The earth was saturated with these horrific images of me. They’d invented this product, and this product somehow looked like me, and I had no control over it,” he shared. “And I was forced to work maybe 290 days out of 365 days a year, and you end up saying some guy’s words more than you say your own, and they aren’t particularly good words, with a lot of histrionics and bad plot points, and that feels bad. It feels really bad. It was horrible.”
Fortunately, betting on himself was the smartest decision he could have made, with his desire to take on as many challenging projects as possible leading to What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Ed Wood, Donnie Brasco, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, to name a few, before he ultimately secured A-list status anyway when Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl took off.
