“We only have so many faces in our pockets”: the role Johnny Depp will always regret not playing
Of all the roles that Johnny Depp has taken on, he surprisingly never played the part that Marlon Brando urged him to take.
Depp’s career is a fascinating case of misinterpreted expectations, as he’s always been an actor who seems to fear being pinned down to just one thing, and although Hollywood seemed keen to make him a heartthrob early on in his career after his breakout role in 21 Jump Street, he instead decided to pursue roles from more artsy, experimental directors like Jim Jarmusch, Tim Burton, and Terry Gilliam, which brough him acclaim.
On the other end of the eccentricity spectrum, his turn as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl wasn’t just an announcement that he was the blockbuster king of Hollywood, but was a means for him to get back in the good graces of critics and mainstream audiences. The swashbuckling adventure earned him his first Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actor’, and he would soon be recognised two more times for his performances in Finding Neverland and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, but unfortunately, his career began to spiral out of control when he continued to heighten his eccentricities, taking on roles like Willy Wonka in Charlie & the Chocolate Factory that he was ill-suited for.
Eventually, Depp’s films even began to fall out of favour with the public, leading him to his depressing current state, where he only seems to appear in tiny international projects that barely get released outside of festivals.
Considering that the actor has played characters as diverse as Tonto from The Lone Ranger and the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, it’s a bit surprising that he never took a more serious interest in the work of William Shakespeare, and he recalled that his friend and mentor, Marlon Brando, once urged him to play one of Shakespeare’s most iconic tragic heroes.
“He asked me how many movies I did a year, and at the time I said, I don’t know, maybe three or something,” Depp said, “He says, ‘Too much, kid. That’s too much. We only have so many faces in our pockets, you know’. I said, ‘OK, I get it’. He said, ‘Why don’t you play Hamlet? You should play Hamlet.’”
Depp revealed he had been trepidatious about playing the role at the time, but now regrets never taking the opportunity: “I said,’ I don’t know, you know, Hamlet’s the kind of cliché thing’. He said, ‘No, man. Do it before you’re too old to do it’. He said, ‘I never got the chance. I never did it. You should do it. Go do it’, and so that still sticks in my head is the possibility of, you know, before I’m too long in the tooth to play Hamlet.”
Given that Hamlet is a role intended for a young actor, it’s unlikely that Depp would now get the opportunity to appear in a new version of the play. It’s a part that has been portrayed by many great actors in both the past and present of Hollywood, including Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh, George MacKay, Ethan Hawke, Richard Burton, Riz Ahmed, and David Tennant.
Brando never played Hamlet, but he did earn one of his most significant roles as Mark Antony in Julius Caesar, and as for Depp, the closest thing he’s doing next to a Shakespearean role is playing another iconic literary character in Ti West’s new version of Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol.
