mar 18, 2014 - INTERVIEW MAGAZINE Johnny Depp Iggy Pop INTERVIEW PHOTOS Bruce Weber

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THERE ARE THOSE WHO MEET THEIR HEROES AND GO, ‘AW, FUCK.’ AND I’VE NEVER
HAD THAT, LUCKILY. I WAS NEVER DISAPPOINTED BY THE PEOPLE I’VE ADMIRED.
Johnny Depp

Even more than the other superstars of his generation (the Pitts, the Clooneys, the Cruises),
Johnny Depp has built a personal mythos as complex and compelling as his career. In a sense, he’s managed to position himself as the beatnik troubadour of American cinema. A!er his early roles, as the cute boyfriend in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and the cute narc on the late-’80s cop show 21 Jump Street, Depp fought against his matinee-idol image. In his first headlining role, in John Waters’s cult greaser comedy Cry-Baby (1990), the actor sent up his own pinup status, playing a high school toughie with his tongue planted firmly in cheek. And, even as he became grist of young-Hollywood tabloid mill (dating the likes of actress Winona Ryder and model Kate Moss), there seemed to be another Depp hiding beyond the spotlight, an inquisitive artist who sought out his creative heroes, including Marlon Brando, the Beats, his good friend
Hunter Thompson, and Thompson’s partner-in-crime, the artist Ralph Steadman (with whom
Depp appears in this month’s For No Good Reason, a documentary about Steadman’s life and work).

With his star turn in Tim Burton’s eerie fantasy Edward Scissorhands (1990), Depp began
putting together the menagerie of oddballs, outcasts, and mis"ts (Ed Wood [1994], Don Juan
DeMarco [1995], Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow [1999], Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [1998]) that would define his reputation as Hollywood’s unpredictable master of disguise. And, for much of the past 15 years, those complicated sideshow characters of Depp’s have been the main attraction in a series of CGI circuses (as Willy Wonka and the Mad Hatter in Burton’s
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory [2005] and Alice in Wonderland [2010], respectively, and as
Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean series).

Now, aged 50, Depp may be reinventing himself yet again. Escaping the makeup trailer in this
month’s techno-fable Transcendence, the actor plays a present-day artificial intelligence
researcher whose mind is incorporated into a computer system—his character, in other words, disappears into a network of his own design.

Or maybe Johnny is just the same old Johnny—the Johnny who, with his band the Kids had a
dream come true by opening for Iggy Pop in the early ’80s. The actor and the musician then met
again on the set of Cry-Baby and have been friends and collaborators ever since (Pop even scored the lone movie that Depp directed, the 1997 drama The Brave). Last February, Pop, who now lives in Florida, phoned Depp, who was at his home in Los Angeles, to talk about heroes, guitar solos, getting into character, and getting away from it all.

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