Johnny Depp

His many enemies may disagree over whether the besotted but noble-hearted Captain Jack Sparrow is either the best or the worst pirate they’ve ever seen, but there’s no questioning the fact that his real-life alter ago Johnny Depp is one of most ingenious actors working on screen today. As Captain Jack’s latest adventure, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, prepares to set sail, Depp welcomed Hollywood.com aboard to pillage and plunder his thoughts about reprising his most popular role.

Hollywood.com: This movie is your first sequel. What was it like returning to a character a second time?
Johnny Depp: It was funny. Just simply going through that process again, going through make-up and hair and buckling myself into the costume, it was like just feeling so natural and normal and right. It just felt right. Literally, I walked onto the set on the first day of shooting, the first scene and I look around me and it's all the same crew members, same director, same faces, and it felt to me like we'd had about a week break since the first one. So you just sort of found it right away. It was just there.

HW: Did you alter you vision for the character of Captain Jack—which it’s been said was based somewhat on the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards—for this film?
JD: I don't know, to me it still feels the same. It's not Keith and it's not me “being” Keith. It's like an impression of Keith. Not an impersonation, my impression, but a kind of broad sort of strokes of the brush and inspired by Keith and Pepe LePew. I definitely feel like there is some Pepe LePew in there.

HW: Is there some Johnny Depp in Captain Jack, too?
JD: Well, he is definitely a big part of me, but they all are. There are certain characters that you play that really take root and it's very difficult to say goodbye to them, it's very difficult to stop being them. Ed Wood was one of those characters. Raoul Duke–playing Hunter Thompson was one of those, and certainly Captain Jack. Once you've arrived at that place where you know that character, where you know that guy you feel like you can tackle anything. There is great safety in being these people.

HW: What’s nice to see in the film is your generosity as an actor. That film is definitely not all Jack Sparrow all the time, which must have been tempting.
JD: I don't know about me being so generous. The writers had a lot to do with it as well. One of the things that we talked about when the idea was brought up to do a sequel to the thing was that it was very important, and all around it was agreed upon, that it shouldn't be “The Captain Jack Show” or that kind of thing. I think that wouldn't have been good, and really the wrong way to go. I think that if Captain Jack worked in the first Pirates of the Caribbean, I believe that he worked, not just because of me or Gore [Verbinski], but because of those other characters–because of Orlando [Bloom], because of Kiera [Knightley], because of Geoffrey [Rush], because of the writers. So you have to have that, all of that, all of those elements to make the thing work I believe.

HW: With all of the terrific performances you’ve given over the years, why do you think this particular character has landed with so many people? All kinds of audiences seem to love and embrace Captain Jack.
JD: Boy, I don't know. I feel like for a number of years the movies that I did and characters that I played, a lot of times the studio or the distributor or whatever didn't really know how to sell it, because in the end they have a product that they have to sell, as we all well know. I don't think that they knew how to sell the thing. They didn't know how to identify or label the product, which is to say—like Ed Wood, for example—“What are we dealing with here? We have a black and white movie about a transvestite movie director. Let’s go.” It was pretty consistent with a lot of films that I did. They just didn't know what they had. Disney and [Jerry] Bruckheimer specifically, these guys got behind that product and went and they knew how to sell it and they knew how to get it out there for people to see it, and without that we'd still be talking about something else. You'd be like, “Johnny, when are you going to do a commercial movie?”

HW: Orlando said that you told him you've made a career out of…
JD: …Failing. Yeah.

HW: What does that mean to you, exactly?
JD: I think that for me the idea that, again, going back all these years to the television show, 21 Jump Street, having sort of been forced into the role at that time it was a real shocker. It was a very uncomfortable situation and I couldn't get a handle on it ,and it wasn't on my terms at all. So making that promise to myself once I was out of that contract to sort of go “This is the direction that I'm going. I will do only the things that I feel are right for me, and it's no one else's decision. I'm going to do that whether it works or whether it fails miserably.” That was really, and still is, surprising that I was able to keep going, that I was able to keep getting jobs and keep doing films and keep trying different things with these characters and stuff. It's still surprising to me. But, for example, there is that business side, the business of Hollywood and the business of movies, which is one thing that didn't make sense to me because I'm not a businessman. I'm just an actor. So as far as all those movies that by Hollywood definition or by industry definition that were failures, to me they were great successes, all of them.

HW: And now there are successes by anyone’s definition, like the first Pirates film and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Has having major mainstream success altered your philosophy at all, or added new pressures?
JD: It would've been nice to do that 20 years ago, but I didn't. And it would've been nice to do it ten years ago, but I didn't. But the fact that Pirates did as well as it did and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory did as well as it did is kind of great, but it's not going to make me change my approach to choices and to the work. I still do exactly the same thing that I always did, which is just doing my work.

HW: There are commercial successes and then there are artistic successes as well–you received Oscar nominations for both Finding Neverland and—in a genre that is virtually never nominated—your first turn as Captain Jack Sparrow.
JD: I still have a couple of failures under my belt. [Laughs] I think that there was a fluke misspelling somewhere. I think that someone somewhere just counted wrong or made a mistake. It has happened before…I'm still surprised by it. That was never anything that I was striving for or going for. It was never in the deepest, darkest recesses of my brain or heart to go for that kind of thing, and so I never expected it, ever. It didn't make sense to me. All of that pressure and all of that sort of focus on this thing that they called a career and success – I just didn't think in those terms. I really felt strongly that at least in the long run even if it was just an absolute slew of failures, at least at the end of it I could break into some rousing rendition of “My Way.” [Laughs]

HW: And you do it your way at home, too. Is there any particular reason that you and Vanessa Paradis have put off tying the knot officially?
JD: Well, I mean, jeez, we've been together eight years and we have two kids. I mean, we're married basically. A common law kind of thing? That sounds fine. We just haven't done the whole public vow thing with the “I shall, I will, I do,” all of that.

HW: Do you still live primarily in France?
JD: We still have a place in France and we still go back there occasionally, but for the most part you go where the work is, and so we were on location in the Bahamas and the Caribbean for months. Not a bad part of the job.

HW: Are the two of you planning on having a bigger family?
JD: They're getting bigger every day! [Smiles] I mean, I hope so. I certainly would love to keep going, and I think that Vanessa would probably like that, too. And I think that the kiddies would like it.

HW: You didn’t wrangle cameos in Pirates 2 for your kids Jack and Lily, did you?
JD: No. I couldn't do that to them. What? Be a stage dad? [Mock-sternly] “Go on, get out there!”

HW: Would you like them to follow in your footsteps at all?
JD: Oh, God, I don't know. You mean become actors? Well, I wouldn't recommend it. It hasn't been bad, but the ups are pretty good and the downs are pretty bad. So I wouldn’t recommend the kind of thing where your level of success or whatever is sort of based on the acceptance of others, that kind of thing. I don't like that notion. I mean, ultimately they're going to do what they want to do. I would hope that they will do something that they can do independently. I always loved the idea of the writer sitting in front of a blank piece of paper and just starts. There is no middle man. There is no nothing.

HW: Do you know what you're doing next?
JD: Pirates 3. Then I don't know what's coming up. Maybe Sweeney Todd. It's looking very good. I'll give it the old college try and do my best on it.