Johnny Depp

If most of his movies haven't struck a chord with the mainstream, however, he's never seemed to care and has, in fact, whistled right past roles in flicks such as Speed, Legends of the Fall and Interview With the Vampire. He does what he does, and yet, of late, strangely and surprisingly, this has begun to work out for him, gross-dollar-wise: Pirates, for one, made $652 million worldwide and turned him into a $20 million-a-picture actor. Because he is Depp, though, this acceptance does not sit upon him easily. While making Pirates, he was delighted when studio executives supervising the picture expressed high anxiety over his foppish characterization of Capt. Jack Sparrow, famously based on Keith Richards (and a whiff of Pepe Le Pew). And if they didn't like what he was doing, they could fire him, but never could they change him. "I can't change it," he likes to say, helplessly. "There's nothing I can do." During the making of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, however, no such early studio concerns were voiced, forcing Depp to think long and hard about what this might mean.

"Frankly, I got worried," he said over his glass of red wine. "It's like something's wrong, because they're not flipping out. I'm not doing my fucking job! But then months into it, Alan Horn, the president of Warner Bros., finally admitted to having felt a little tinge of fear over the initial dailies, and I thought, 'OK, I'm all right.' "

But enough of this Hollywood talk, because there's so much more to life than that. The smell of Lagavulin single-malt Scotch whisky, for example. "You've got to smell it," Depp said, flagging down a waitress. "Can we get a snifter of Lagavulin?" he said. "Just straight." He continued, "I don't drink hard liquor anymore, but I sometimes order Lagavulin just for the smell. It's so good. It's unbelievable."

A moment later, Depp lifted the snifter to his nose and breathed deeply.

His face lit up.

"Peat," he said, chocolate eyes swirling with appreciation. "It's so peaty!"

This is an interesting time in the life of Depp, many changes afoot, largely precipitated by a vision he saw seven years ago, in Paris, in the lobby of the Hotel Costes. It was of a woman. Her dress revealed her back, and her back greeted her neck in such a way that Depp's insides buckled and he suddenly experienced one of life's greater miracles. "Whammo, man, across the room, amazing, incredible, awesome," he said, working himself into a lather. "The Back, the Back, I saw the Back, and I was reduced to" -- and here he made a blubbering, love-struck kind of noise. The woman was Paradis, and the feeling was mutual. Within a few months, she was good and pregnant, and shortly thereafter, Depp quickly evolved into the family man he is today, with a $2 million villa in the South of France, near the Riviera, where he and Paradis spend much of their free time. He likes it there. When he goes shopping in a nearby town, he's just another guy shopping in a nearby town. He's calm there. He spends his hours wandering around his vegetable garden or playing with the kids, instead of doing what he used to do back in Hollywood, drinking himself into a stupor, etc. He's a good man there. A better man.

(Excerpted from RS 967, February 10, 2005)

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