Johnny Depp: "It takes a moment to turn you into a monster"

• LUIS MARTINEZ

  Cannes

Updated Wednesday,20September2023-23:50

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Johnny Depp (Owensboro, Kentucky, 1963) says he smokes. Although, in truth, it doesn't. "Do you mind if I smoke?" he asks, an unlit cigarette between his fingers. "I'm not actually going to smoke. I'm just studying a character and that's why... Well, what a dumb excuse," he continues in a bizarre soliloquy that seems to lead nowhere. And, indeed, it is. It doesn't matter that you smoke without smoking.

The actor presents in Cannes, on the terrace of the Marriott hotel overlooking the Croisette de Cannes and the yachts of the bay, which is both his last film and the first of all; the first after the defamation trial broadcast by land, sea and air that confronted his ex, Amber Heard, and that at this point already has his own documentary in installments on Netflix. For the very clueless, clarify that the jury concluded – after, yes, to hold the two responsible for the unsustainable and very battered marriage – that Heard was guilty of defamation.

This time, he won. Earlier, in the case against The Sun newspaper, Depp was the one who lost. "Let us be clear," he points out, warns and points out (all at once) the interpreter's representative, "that no questions about the trial will be accepted." Like smoking without smoking, winning without winning at all, interviewing without asking.

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Jeanne du Barry is the title of the film directed by the French Maïwenn in which Depp gives life to Louis XV himself. That is, the Beloved King, the one who goes after the greatest of all and before the one who lost his head in the guillotine. The film was kind enough to open the Cannes Film Festival last May and it was then, a day after the presentation at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, when the meeting with the press took place. As soon as the screening was over, the audience on its feet certified for a dozen minutes that, indeed, Johnny Depp had returned.

Johnny Depp

Wait a minute, he was back, where exactly did he come from? "The truth is that I'm not sure why everyone insists on calling it that. I would understand if we talked back if I had broken my back and right now I was tap dancing on stage. Or if, say, I had died and at this precise moment I was in front of you giving an interview about my death, "he says, takes a second and, finally, concedes that some sense has the effort of everyone to talk about his return: "It is true that for a while my phone stopped ringing. Or, better, it sounded less. It's in moments like the past recently that you realize that it takes an instant to become a monster." Return without having left.

The most painful thing about being fired from a movie is that it was based on lies.

In the film, which opens next Friday, Johnny Depp looks undaunted in a mode of interpretation that, at this point, is already a brand of the house. "My reference for the role and for almost everything is Buster Keaton," he says, seeking pedigree perhaps to his, shall we say, inaction. Acting without acting. He remembers that he was surprised that the director remembered him ("from a Kentucky stick", he defines himself) to give life to the most French of all the French that in the history of France have been.

"When Maïwenn wanted to talk to me for the role, my first thought was that someone was making a mistake. What was I doing sticking my nose into a culture that has nothing to do with me?" he says just after acknowledging, with some false modesty imposed, that his old and worn-out marriage to the French Vanessa Paradis and his possessions on the French Riviera retain something more than a distant familiarity with the Gallic affair. "I had to work a lot on my battered French... On the other hand, I love risk. I have no fear of regrets and find failure an interesting experience. It was definitely an intense, unusual and, above all, very fun adventure," he recalls.

STÉPHANIE BRANCHUWHY NOT PRODUCTIONS

Be that as it may, what is interesting is the harmony, almost rhyming, between the plot of the film and, why not, the life of an actor who, first of all, is above all a star. We are talking about a king locked in his court with the appearance and manners of a golden cage who, one day, discovers love and, because of his condition something more than just real, does not know what to do or how to behave. Always exposed, always judged, always sentenced.

"The courtesan Jeanne du Barry made the king discover issues such as tenderness and vulnerability. And that for a monarch is much more dangerous than a war... It should be borne in mind that Louis XV came to the throne at a very young age and was educated based exclusively on the crown he was going to hold. He was trained to erase from his personality all traces of sensibility or simple humanity. And for all this he was a prisoner since childhood of a machinery of power supported by an extraordinarily rigid label in which there was no room under any circumstances for a gesture of weakness such as falling in love, "Depp recites in an improvised history class to which Maïwenn, the director sitting next to him, can not help but nod.

Would you say that the French court has anything to do with Hollywood? I don't know if you could take the parallel that far. It is true that Hollywood is a system of power based on success. When he comes up with a formula that works, he makes it as rigid a rule as the actual label itself. And that causes any vestige of creativity or spontaneity to be annulled. No matter how good a formula is, it ends up being spent if it does not have something of life inside, of spontaneity. Yes, definitely, something has to do with one thing with another.

Johnny Depp knows what he's talking about. Hollywood loved him and Hollywood disowned him. Hollywood took him to the undisputed throne of the success of which he speaks and Hollywood – although the specific monarch he now embodies does not coincide – cut off his head. "When you get fired from a movie [it happened in 2020 during the filming of Fantastic Beasts, shortly before you stopped counting for Pirates of the Caribbean], you can't help but feel canceled. The most painful thing is that they dispense with you based on lies. Suddenly, you see yourself as an intruder. But everything is learned and the most painful experiences make you mature. I can say that I have left all that behind. Do I think about it? Never. Does it affect my future? Not at all. Now, for example, I would tell him that I don't feel marginalized by Hollywood at all, for the simple reason that Hollywood doesn't occupy a second of my thoughts. If I look back, I realize that everything has been a long learning process to play a game without playing it at all, always looking for my own way of interpreting being true to myself. If I tell the truth, it's as if I woke up from a dream of more than 30 years."

STÉPHANIE BRANCHUWHY NOT PRODUCTIONS

Actually, it would seem that it is more years than the confessed that Depp has been there. With little more than 20 years he debuted in the cinema in Nightmare on Elm Street, by Wes Craven, and, since then, he never stopped belonging, like it or not, to Hollywood royalty.

"Since I was 23 years old, I have had the impression that I have lived in a shop window in full view of everyone. I have contemplated the world from the glass windows of luxury hotels and from the windows of cars, planes, trains... I am aware of the privilege, but it is also a condemnation. It is both a gift and a curse. You enjoy the privilege of dedicating yourself to a creative craft, but you experience solitude from very close and from the highest place. There is nothing around you that comes close to what we call normality. And by this I don't mean it's not normal. I'm just not sure what being normal is," he reflects and doesn't reflect at the same time. And it makes him happy, but without being noticed.

I don't feel marginalized or censored by Hollywood, because I don't think about Hollywood at all.

Although the questions for the famous trial are vetoed, he himself is responsible for taking the conversation along a nearby path. He rails against Rupert Murdoch's media, against whom he lost a first trial ("When I realized that the media only wanted one version of the facts, the most scandalous, I learned to keep quiet. I could no longer speak"), and he does so while sharing what he learned in his long judicial journey: "I have fought my battle against lies. After all, they are part of our culture for better or worse. Let's not forget that we grow up believing in Santa Claus. We assume that lying is part of our way of life. We adults constantly lie to ourselves. And over time you realize that a lie can be the most beautiful thing that life can give you – that's what cinema and art consist of – and the most absurd, surreal and boring – that's what the media is today. Pause. Surprised face. "Well, not all of them." And he laughs.

And in all this time, is there any specific memory that has marked you? My work with Marlon Brando, definitely. I remember him on the set of The Brave and I remember how he used the headphones when he worked. It was his way of interpreting because he refused to memorize the role. His secretary, Caroline, dictated the script. I was 75 years old, I slept very little... I don't know why I dared to direct him...

And having said that, put out the already extinguished cigarette in the ashtray, perhaps useless. Smoking without smoking.

• Johnny Depp
• cinema
• Films