The worst audition of Johnny Depp’s career: “I embarrassed myself to new heights”
In Johnny Depp’s opinion, the greatest thing about the A-list status he achieved in Hollywood wasn’t the fame or the fortune. Instead, he was delighted when he realised he didn’t have to audition for parts anymore, and that most roles would be presented to him instead. Depp hated auditioning with a passion, and in his early years, he even admitted to being genuinely terrible at it.
For Depp, the problem with auditioning was that he struggled to be “on” for the few minutes he awkwardly stood in front of the casting agents. As they stared a hole through him in a quiet, sterile room, all his preconceived notions of acting being an artistic pursuit that connects with an audience went out the window. He realised they expected him to turn his emotions on and off like a light switch, and that didn’t sit well with the passionate young performer.
“I was a young idiot,” Depp remembered at the AFI Festival in 2015. “I recognised that this process really had far less to do with performance and far less to do with connecting. So, in my mind I always thought, to put it in a very nice way, ‘This is horseshit.’ It’s an uncomfortable place to be where you feel you must be ‘on.'”
Fittingly, Depp believes the best audition he ever did was for 21 Jump Street in the ’80s, but that was only because he was suffering from “one of the worst flus I’ve ever experienced in my life”. So, when he was called in for the audition at the last minute, feeling like death warmed over, it meant he was so focused on his ailments that he didn’t get in his head like usual. The very next day, he hopped on a plane to Vancouver to begin filming the show.
On the other hand, Depp’s worst audition was so humiliating that he completely swore off the practice in the wake of it. At some unspecified moment in time, the actor revealed that he contacted the Coen brothers about reading for “something or another” because he was such a massive fan of the quirky siblings’ work. He couldn’t remember which film he auditioned for specifically, but he’ll never forget how much he wanted the ground to open up and swallow him by the time the audition concluded.
“It was mortifying,” Depp recalled with horror. “I can only imagine the choices I must’ve made, but what I do remember very, very well was how loud the silence was after I finished and whatever I had done.” The rueful star admitted, “I embarrassed myself to new heights.”
As he stood there in that awful extended silence, looking at the Coens’ stony, unmoving faces, he confessed to thinking, “How do I get out of this fucking room?”
In truth, though, he imagined they were also wondering, “How do we get him out of this fucking room?” In the end, a few awkward words were exchanged before he swiftly exited with a quiet, “Well, good then. Thanks.”
Hilariously, Depp reckoned his botched audition was so unforgettably woeful that, even though he went on to become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, he was sure the Coens would still veto the idea of working with him. When the AFI moderator tried to make him feel better by saying the brothers would come back around to him because “that’d be a great collaboration,” a sardonic Depp quipped, “Not if they have any memory of that audition.”
As for which Coen project Depp missed out on, that will have to remain a mystery. It’s fun to imagine the role he read for, though. Is there a world where Depp could have embraced his inner ‘dudeness’ to play Jeffrey ‘The Dude’ Lebowski? Were we robbed of him exploring his zany side as H I McDunnough? Or, most fascinatingly of all, could he have saddled himself with Anton Chigurh’s bizarre hairdo and scared the bejesus out of audiences? We’ll never know.
