feb 26, 2010 - EW Johnny Depp Tim Burton RETROSPECTIVE INTERVIEW

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Back in 2003, Johnny Depp famously panicked Disney executives with his whacked-out turn as Pirates of the Caribbean‘s Captain Jack Sparrow — only to have the character become an instant icon.

For the upcoming 3-D Alice in Wonderland, opening March 5, Depp decided to dive even further down the rabbit hole with an orange-haired, green-eyed, nonsense-spouting take on Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter.

Alice is Depp's seventh collaboration with director Tim Burton, and anyone who's seen the other films they've made together — including Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — knows they share a taste for, as Depp puts it, "the slightly left of center." Still, with this gonzo turn as the Hatter, Depp braced himself for a full-blown freakout in Disney's executive suites. "When we first went in to do the camera tests, I was thinking, ‘They're going to lose their minds,'" Depp recalls. "But Tim fully supported it. It was a couple of solid hours in the makeup chair everyday but it really helped. You start to understand who the guy is through all that weird kind of Carrot Top kabuki."

Twenty years ago, a frustrated young TV star and a wild-haired filmmaker met at a hotel off the Sunset Strip, drank coffee, and talked. To an outside observer, Johnny Depp and Tim Burton would have seemed an unlikely pair: one, a reluctant teen idol; the other, a shy, rumpled director with a penchant for the macabre. But from that meeting sprang a creative partnership that has produced some of the most memorable oddball characters in recent movie history: An alienated teenage Frankenstein with scissors for hands. A cross-dressing Z-movie director. A demented candy maker. A murderous barber.

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