July 23, 2006

Johnny Depp is still wearing his pirate teeth — gold and platinum and twinkling — and they look like they belong. In many ways, he had always been a pirate — of hearts and souls at least. He is a one-man subculture, a fairy tale you grew up with. The more you know him, the more you like him — but the more he seems to both contradict and confirm all the myths about him.

Did he chase the paparazzi in a most threatening manner when they tried to snap Vanessa Paradis’s baby tummy? Of course he did - anything to protect his girl. Is it true that this edgy, dark, outsider actor, famed for playing losers, drug addicts, transvestites and various gothically lost souls in indie movies, is now a blockbuster superhero - or at least a super antihero? The first film in the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy took $650m at the box office and Depp’s Captain Jack was nominated for Oscar gold. It seems altogether a myth of reinvention — but it’s true.

For the Los Angeles premiere of Dead Man’s Chest, there was a red carpet three miles long. Producer Jerry Bruckheimer says that the trilogy simply couldn’t have happened without Depp. Bill Nighy, who rather surreally plays a giant squid pirate, says: “Johnny’s Jack Sparrow is one of those rare performances that has entered the language. It will survive down the years and I can risk describing it as iconic.”

That’s quite a turnaround because at the onset of the first movie, Depp was considered too edgy for Disney. That is not to say that the man in front of me has gone soft. He is still a pirate, going his own way, living by his own rules.”

Disney didn’t want to give him the part of Jack in the beginning. “I took a lot of heat from Disney and the people that write the cheques, but I really did feel strongly that I was heading in the right direction,” he says. “This was my take on Captain Jack. This was who I thought he should be.”

Jack Sparrow is both a pirate hero and a pirate villain. He appeals to little kids and hardened adults in equal measure. He is charmless and charming, the perfect antidote of louche sexiness against the uptight Will Turner, played by Orlando Bloom. Originally, he said he based the character on a mixture of Pepé Le Pew, the Looney Tunes cartoon skunk, and Rolling Stone’s Keith Richards, whom he cajoled out of illness to play a pirate relative in the final Pirates film. “We got together in a hotel room and dressed up as pirates. He looked beautiful in the clothes and his hair was in dreads. Gorgeous! Just gorgeous!” He laughs and twinkles.

Despite the “heavy amount of salesmanship involved”, there are aspects of being a pirate that Johnny truly loves. He is wearing a grey fedora, tousled hair and soulful eyes. They don’t miss anything and they reveal everything. He has got a collection of bracelets, one made by his daughter, Lily Rose, another a cross wound round with drawings by his son, Jack. He has Jack’s name tattooed on his arm and just above it, Jack Sparrow’s pirate crest. Jack the son came before Jack the pirate.

It has been more than 20 years since Depp quit as the cutesy cop in the American television series, 21 Jump Street, and now, after What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Finding Neverland, Corpse Bride etc, people thinking of him as a product doesn’t bother him because he knows he’s not one. He doesn’t even see his own story as an arc of struggle, success, failure, triumph. “I was in a cluster of movies that, by Hollywood definitions, were not successful. They were flops. I was considered box-office poison, but to me they were all successful. I don’t know how to explain it, but by some miracle I have always been able to choose my characters for movies.

“Being able to get jobs throughout the ‘90s should have been hard, yet I was able to do every single film I wanted to do and with every film-maker I wanted to work with. To me, whether I’m playing Ed Wood or Fear and Loathing, all these movies have commercial potential. Pirates could have easily flopped. It’s always a crap shoot.”