“I held on to my chair very tightly”: the movie Johnny Depp could barely bring himself to watch
Anyone who has seen François Truffaut‘s terrific 1973 comedy Day for Night, which tracks a film being made in real time with all the on-set politics and drama we read about in the papers, will probably be familiar with a scene in which the cast and crew sit down together to watch the daily rushes, a chance to watch back what has been filmed that day.
The lead actor, in particular, flat out refuses to attend them, hating to watch themselves on the screen, and it seems that Johnny Depp takes after him.
You might quite rightly wonder to yourself how an actor of his standing, a veteran of almost 100 movies over a 40-year career, wouldn’t be able to take a look at the footage of whatever he’s filming, rather like a chef outright saying no to having a taste of the food they’ve just cooked. But Depp once told The Guardian simply, “I hate watching myself on screen. I can’t stand it”.
Now that might well be understandable if he’s talking about his endless Pirates of the Caribbean movies, or the lamentable The Lone Ranger, which flopped back in 2013, but Depp has done plenty of excellent stuff you might imagine he could well be proud of, and at least two years after playing Tonto he did force himself to watch his Boston mob flick Black Mass, for which he got considerable acclaim.
Of having to sit through the 2015 gangster movie, he added: “I held on to my chair very tightly”.
The film sees Depp alongside Jessie Plemons, Joel Edgerton and Dakota Johnson, playing a gang leader called James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, a ruthless criminal who turns informant when he runs into a childhood friend who works for the FBI.
Directed by Scott Cooper, who made his name after writing and directing the double Oscar-winning Crazy Heart with Jeff Bridges, Black Mass required Depp to go through hours of make-up and prosthetics to play Bulger, and he studied a huge amount of footage of police interviews with the late gangster.
That level of detail is obviously key to Depp and the parts he takes on, as he explained, “It’s very, very important to me, no matter who the person is, to play that person with the utmost degree of truth that I’m able to bring.”
The movie came some 18 years after he’d taken on a different, but equally violent role in Donnie Brasco, the 1997 crime thriller about FBI informers that saw him go head to head with an ‘on best form’ Al Pacino, and was nominated for an Oscar for ‘Best Screenplay’. But Black Mass, which also featured Benedict Cumberbatch and Kevin Bacon, performed almost as well, bringing in $100million on a budget of half that amount.
Depp is, of course, currently in the process of trying to ‘uncancel’ himself following the damagingly public court case with his former wife Amber Heard that saw his movie-making career in tatters and got him dropped from the Fantastic Beasts franchise for Mads Mikkelsen. He has made just one movie in the last six years, the period drama Jeanne du Barry, but has a couple of new projects in the works. There’s a thriller called Day Drinker with his frequent collaborator Penélope Cruz, and a Ti West-directed adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic, Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, with Ian McKellen.
