Johnny Depp

In his latest movie From Hell, Johnny Depp stars as Inspector Abberline, the man on the trail of Jack The Ripper, notorious London serial killer and arguably the first tabloid villain. The movie, by the Hughes Brothers, also stars Heather Graham, Ian Holm and Robbie Coletrane.

For Depp, who now lives with his family in France, it’s another dark role; the erstwhile heartthrob seems determined to pursue the career of an actor rather than a superstar. Here, after all, is a man who was willing to put celluloid flesh on the crazed legend of Hunter S. Thompson. Other notable movies of Depp’s include Sleepy Hollow, Ed Wood, Edward Scissorshands, Chocolat, Blow and The Astronaut’s Wife.

Turning up for this interview, he makes quite an effort to hide his incredible good looks, wearing worn shoes, a hat with a hole and a sweater, also with a hole. His hair is greasy and pokes through the hat. “Can I smoke in here?” he begins. Yeah, you can smoke in here. “I’m not really addicted, you know,” he smiles, “I just do it.”

Would you rather we talk about your eating habits? The Hughes brothers said how you would eat all the fried chicken on the set and still stay skinny.

We ate a lot of fried chicken. I was born in Kentucky and raised in South Florida to hillbilly parents, so I was weaned on bacon fat. I was weaned on pork fat and grease.

So, it’s an obligation?

Well, it’s a part of my chemical being. I need it. (Laughs) It’s comfort.

You drank Absinthe in the film – rather than moonshine...

They will equally do one of two things or both; they will get your car started and make it drive very fast. Or, could very easily chop your ear off like Van Gogh.

You seem to be fascinated by Jack The Ripper – do you have your own theory?

There are so many great theories about this case. I think the one that we show in the film, is one of the more interesting ones certainly. The royal cover up. It’s a strong one. But the one that rings true for me is from a book called The Lodger, by Stuart Evans. The Ripper was an American quack, who was in London at that time, it’s all well documented. He was actually a suspect. He was brought in and questioned, detained and when he was released, he immediately caught a ship back to the States and the murders stopped in England. Dr Francis Tumblety was his name – he was some flamboyant guy and a total woman hater. A lot of spooky things about that guy.

Why were you fascinated by it?

A couple of reasons. First and primarily, it’s because it went unsolved, that such a hideous act and such a grisly murder could remain unsolved is fascinating. That there are so many possibilities about who it might have been. The Ripper case is interesting, a lot of things were born out of it. It marked the birth of tabloid journalism. I think at the time when the first couple of murders happened, there were maybe, roughly twenty publications on the street. And within weeks and months there were like thousands. So, these guys figured out how to exploit the Ripper case and get rich. That’s the interesting thing. All these journalists were born out of that case and the Ripper was elevated to this sort of celebrity status. And he could see it happening from his window.

Do you think he was working the media or was the media working him?

I think he didn’t have to work the media. It seems to me that the one letter which was actually written by the real killer was not the one that was signed Jack The Ripper; I think that they proved that it was a newspaper man actually who wrote that letter. The one letter which I think is real is the From Hell letter, where a portion of a kidney arrived with the letter. It was a diseased kidney and it matched up perfectly with one of the victims. So, I think he didn’t have to work the media.

Can you think of a place in the world right now that you would address as ‘From Hell’, if you sent a letter from there?

There’s a good one! Boy, the world is in a state of hell right now. The whole world is hell at the moment. Hell must be what the families of the victims of the tragedy are feeling – it must be beyond hell what they are feeling. I don’t think any of us can grasp what they must be feeling.

What’s your idea of heaven?

My idea of heaven is my family – my daughter, my girls, you know, and being away from everything and knowing that they are safe.

Was your daughter on the set? I imagine there were a lot of grisly looking bodies everywhere.

She didn’t see the grisly bodies, but she was on the set. I won’t go anywhere, at least for long periods of time, without them. I’ve got to be with them and they’ve got to be with me.

What do you think of the Hughes brothers as directors?

Vision, I think is something I’ve experienced with a lot of these guys. Strong vision and the inability to compromise. That’s what I’ve admired with the guys I’ve worked with, Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and the brothers. I have to say, I was a big fan after I saw Menace To Society and Dead Presidents. What really impressed me about these guys, is that after those two films Hollywood was all over them. They offered them everything under the sun and certainly we are trying to label them with all the ghetto filmmakers – who make movies in the hood and that stuff. And they didn’t buy it. They didn’t take Hollywood up, they waited. They didn’t do a thing.

The next thing they did after that was years and years later and it was just Albert with a little camera and Allen with a little dat machine and they went out and interviewed a bunch of guys and made American Pimp, just the two of them. That was really the most impressive, because that is real filmmaking.

You’ve also sort of resisted Hollywood making you into this stereotypical leading man – you haven’t taken those kind of roles.

Not yet. (Laughs)

Are you at some point going to go down that route?

No, no, no, I don’t think so. I don’t think they want me for that stuff anymore. I wouldn’t be good at it. I don’t think I’d be able to do it, I’d be so bored. I’d go apeshit, I wouldn’t be able to do it.

You seem pretty comfortable playing these kind of heavy characters.

They are guys that I am interested in. They are characters that I find interesting. That’s the thing; I figured that if you’re going to be an actor, the guys I’ve admired have been character actors, so I want to play characters. I don’t want to do the straight thing that is expected, the more predictable formula orientated roles. I just don’t like that.

Does your hat have any significance?

It covers my head!

Is it a present from anyone?

No, he’s just an old friend. I picked him up. I have no idea where, it was maybe fifteen years ago or longer, I recently rescued him from a box which he was trapped in, inside my house. He’d been there for about ten years and I forgot all about him, and I felt horrible, so I yanked him out.

Does he have a name?

No.

Do all of your clothes have genders?

No, no, I probably got that from my absolute confusion with the French language where everything is he or she. Masculine or feminine.

But you call him a friend.

Yeah, he’s an old friend, like my boots are very old friends. They are very old friends. You spend everyday with these articles, everyday for many, many years and they’ve gotten you through a lot of experiences, so they are spiritual in a way. They are friends.

Do you not like to wear new fashionable clothes?

I would be such a wreck! I don’t know what new and fashion is.

The designers must be throwing things at you?

I don’t know. We don’t really get dressed up too much. There are a couple of designers who’ve been really sweet to me. They do some nice old thirties gangster kind of clothes. These guys Dolce & Gabana have been very sweet. I actually wore one of their suits yesterday. So, now I’m a fashion victim? (Laughs)

Your necklace is at home.

Yeah, he’s at home, I forgot to put him on today. (Laughs)

We’ve heard some anecdotes of fart cushions, tattoos and hip hop on the set. Is there a crazy set scenario which went down that you can share with us?

Well the brothers are insane. One thing that we did, there’s a guy who works with me called Sam. We were going to play a joke on the entire crew, especially on the brothers. Sam had this fixation with spiders. He’s a writer and everywhere he went it seemed there would be a spider on the table, or on the wall. I couldn’t control him. He would take the spider and put it in his drink and down it, because he felt that the spider was following him, so he needed to do that. He would do it. No one asked him to do it. He had to do it. He did it in a bizarre way out of respect for the spider. I think it lived all the way down his gullet. (Laughs) He said he could feel it moving. So, the Hughes brothers thought he was completely out of his mind, understandably.

So, we devised this joke where I took a pencil and wrote in green ink to where it looked like a tattoo – “Farty” then just a small “n” on his face – and then we took a big white gauze bandage and movie blood and put it all over it. He arrived on set, and everyone said: “What happened?” And he said: “I don’t want to talk about it.” So we did that for three days. Then I spread the rumour that Sam got wildly drunk and had a bad experience with a spider and he went out and got a tattoo on his face and wouldn’t show it to me, so when I got the Hughes brothers into my trailer, I told him to show them. So, he pulled the thing off and it said: “Farty…..n” and Allen and Albert were astounded. There was this ungodly silence, then Allen goes: “We’ve got to get you home, man. You’re in trouble.”

Talking of tattoos, the one on your index finger shows up in shot, what’s the significance of that?

Three is just a number which I’ve always liked, it’s a special number. These little boxes are something that I did. A friend of mine did it. I left it for the character; it would say something of his social status. It would say that he is more from the streets, he was of the working class.

Were the opium den and the bath tub scenes good to do?

Well, I wanted more actually, I wanted to show a more human side of Abberline. There have been contempory accounts that I’ve read of police officers and detectives who because of the nature of their work – the sometimes disturbing cases involved – they’ve had battles with alcoholism and drug abuse. I thought that was an interesting parallel to what Abberline might be going through. Especially with the idea of the visions and it wouldn’t be that he necessarily needed the drugs to have the visions, but he’d become addicted and needed the drugs to get well and to silence the demons in his head so he could then have clarity.

How do you know stuff about the drugs and drink back then?

Well, there are some very important books. One is really famous from the 1700s called Confessions Of An English Opium Eater by Thomas DeQuincey which is a pretty important book. Then a lesser known book, which I like, was written in the 1860s called The Hashish Eater, it sort of just documents. Little hashish bon bons, candy, would come into the States and you could buy them at the candy store and get zipped out of your head. This guy was writing about traveling across country in a wagon, high on hashish in the time of Abraham Lincoln, that was pretty fascinating. (Laughs)

Did any of the Rippologists help you with your character’s use of drugs from the 1800s?

You mean with the opium pipe? Nope, I didn’t need a Rippologist for that. (laughs) I had enough practice from my younger days. It’s like riding a bike, you don’t forget things like that.

Were opium dens really that popular in the late-1800s or was it just a cool cinematic device?

They existed, the film’s pretty accurate about them. There is quite a lot of stuff available on them, a lot of picture books on opium dens. Back in that time, you could get any of that stuff, it was easily available. I mean, housewives were strung out. Even Sherlock Holmes was a dope addict. Basil Rathbone referred to his addiction in the Sherlock Holmes films. It’s amazing how rampant drug use was back then. Even as recently as the 1920s and ‘30s, there was one of the big aspirin companies which was manufacturing over-the-counter heroin. Thank God, though, that they took all that stuff off the market. (laughs) If they hadn’t, we’d really be elsewhere now.”

Do you prefer to be sober?

I definitely gave up the game of polluting my body which I had done for many, many years and which I was pretty good at. Now, I’m an old boring guy, I drink wine, pastis.

That’s a nice drug.

Yeah, a little wine is great. I’m a wine head. I’m an expensive wino now! (laughs) Wine can get dangerously expensive.

Is being a movie star a dream come true for you?

It’s hard for me to think of myself as a movie star, you know. Because a movie star is kind of, I don’t know, to be a movie star would be too much pressure. It would mean you couldn’t really be an actor anymore, you know. I am certainly aware of how lucky I am to have the job. I am real aware of that. I’m appreciative of that. It’s more important to be an actor than to be a movie star.

You don’t seem to be like most movie stars who have that thing about them, that they’ll panic if it all fell apart tomorrow?

I think it is falling apart slowly, but surely.

Your career is not falling apart?

Well, you never know, it might be slowly. It just might be a longer process. What makes you think so? I’m just babbling. If it goes away, it goes away, there are more things in life. More interesting things. I am not sure I would be totally satisfied doing this for my whole life. I mean there is other stuff out there.

What are you doing next?

It’s pretty early to tell. I think it’s early to tell what Hollywood is going to do. I think we’ve seen enough disaster movies. After what happened, I would want to see Bambi. I want to escape, I would put the Wizard Of Oz on a hundred and fifty times, that’s what I’ll do.

Two days after From Hell premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, several of that city’s newspapers made reference to The Ripper’s “20th century” line to describe the horrific tragedies that occurred in New York and Washington, D.C. on September 11. Were you aware of that?

Oh really? No, I wasn’t. But, I think that the world did turn a corner on that day. We’ll never... no one will ever think the same and no one will ever be the same again.

Do you think this is bad timing for a film as dark and violent as From Hell to be released? A lot of people are insisting we should just go out and see comedies or love stories to forget our troubles.

You know, I mean, it’s already difficult to have to sit around and talk about movies in the midst of what has happened. Is this the movie that people should go see, I don’t know? I mean, we have to keep going forward, and movies are a form of escapism. So, if people want to go and get out of reality for a couple of hours, then why not go see From Hell? It’ll certainly have them thinking about things other than what is going on in the world right now.

You’ve been living in France with your family for a while now. Are you going to stay there if a full-out war breaks out? Is living in Europe even more dangerous than living in the States?

I think that everyone is exposed – all over the world. I mean, we are targets everywhere.

So, what are you going to do?

My immediate plans are to get back to my family, to be with my girls. Then, from there, I don’t know. I can’t say that I’m very comfortable putting my daughters, my two-and-a-half-year-old daughter and my girl on a plane at the moment. Listen, I just flew a couple of days ago, for fourteen hours, and I was uncomfortable the whole time.

Denzel Washington recently told me he had some deep-rooted fears that terrorists might start targeting celebrities. Is that a concern of yours?

No, I don’t think so. From what I understand – from what the news tells us – the Taliban, the Al-Queda and Osama Bin-Laden consider all Americans targets. All Americans are the infidels and in their eyes, we’re totally evil. I have a lot of friends who are Muslim and that is not what Islam is all about – that’s not a Muslim view. So, who knows what is going to happen? We are all in the same situation.

OK, let’s get back to the film. From Hell is your second foggy night, horse and buggy movie in two years. Are you attracted to period pieces or is it just happenstance you did From Hell so close to Sleepy Hollow?

It’s just happenstance. I mean, when Sleepy Hollow came along, and it was Tim Burton, certainly I was all over that. Then, when Allen and Albert Hughes came to me with From Hell – obviously a subject I’ve been interested in since I was a little kid – I sort of had to jump on it, too. It was meant to happen for me.

Are you worried about flying back to France?

I’m not particularly excited about it. I never was a huge fan of flying anyway.

Do you do anything for good luck for the flight?

No, I hope for the best and in these times, you really have to hope for the best.