“Irrelevant to him”: the iconic Patrick Swayze role Johnny Depp turned down on the spot
Now that he has essentially morphed completely into Keith Richards (and has reached the age of 62), it’s a little harder to remember that Johnny Depp at one point was the fresh-faced Hollywood bad boy that adorned the vast majority of teenage bedroom walls back in the 1980s.
Depp was admittedly always a bit of rebel, though, even when many were expecting him to go down the Tom Cruise route to blockbusters after his initial success in movies like Oliver Stone’s Platoon, rather than turning completely in the other direction, picking indie fare like the John Waters comedy Cry Baby and Tim Burton’s bizarre 1990 goth fantasy Edward Scissorhands instead.
He simply didn’t seem to care too much about whether or not the roles he chose would bring in a lot of money, instead deciding to forge a partnership with Burton that would end up spanning nine films in 25 years, and selecting parts that he found creatively interesting rather than movies that guaranteed box office success.
Two examples of this came in the first half of the 1990s, when Depp decided to take on the strange romantic comedy Benny and Joon and Burton’s black and white biographical comedy drama Ed Wood rather than one of the most popular action-thrillers of the decade.
The boss of Columbia Pictures at the time was Dawn Steel, and she attempted to convince Depp that Point Break, the heist movie from female director Kathryn Bigelow, would be an ideal vehicle for him to go more mainstream, but Depp was having none of it and wasn’t interested in Point Break being his big break, as Steel explained a couple of years later, “I’ve just offered him another movie and an enormous amount of money. And I know he will make the decision not based on anything other than whether or not he likes the part. Rising to the top of the heap is irrelevant to him.”
The role in Point Break went to Patrick Swayze instead, who was making the biggest films of the late 1980s and early ‘90s, while Depp became Hollywood royalty regardless of not being in films that matched the size of his celebrity, and if anything, his eccentricity added to his appeal. His fame probably peaked in the late 1990s, when he took on the gangster story Donnie Brasco alongside Al Pacino and then made Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the story of journalist Hunter S Thompson and his descent into drug-induced psychedelia.
Over the first quarter of this century, he has been in and out of movies and the press, never too far from controversy, while building a library of movies that went against his early years by including blockbusters like the Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts franchise and, most spectacularly, as Captain Jack Sparrow in five Pirates of the Caribbean movies between 2003 and 2017.
The films, which were inspired by a ride at the Disneyworld theme parks, grossed over $4.5billion at the box office, and much of that was down to Depp’s iconic character for which he received three Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Actor’. That was despite studio bosses initially being very unsure about his swaying, slurry, booze-soaked portrayal of the character.
After three years without making a movie, Depp is now filming Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol as part of a cast including Daisy Ridley, Rupert Grint, Ian McKellen and Andrea Riseborough. It’s directed by Ti West, who helmed the X horror trilogy.
