Johnny Depp talks about Pirates, Hollywood, France and high school.
Anyone who saw Johnny Depp on Jay Leno saw that he still had his gold teeth in from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Before even that appearance, when we met Depp for interviews, we were struck by the sparkling chompers. That wasn’t all. He still had the goatee and a lot of the costume put together.
But Johnny Depp is awesome, so he can be a little weird. If this is what serves all his eccentric characters, so be it. Pirates is no exception, as he turns a traditional action hero into a total goof. This guy wobbles and stumbles, goes bug-eyed but still manages to save the day.
Your teeth are still in?
They’re still there, yeah. I never had a chance to take them out.
What are they?
They’re gold and platinum.
Are they caps?
It was a cap, it was molded to my teeth to fit over my teeth and then they bonded them onto my teeth.
Was the studio ever resistant to your characterization of Jack Sparrow?
Well, yeah. Early on for quite a while.
How did you fight back?
I remember I had two more gold teeth and there were a few that wanted them gone, in fact wanted them all gone. And they wanted the braids in my beard gone and they wanted a lot of the trinkets and things gone. I just basically said, “I respect you guys. I’ll compromise to some degree which means I’ll take two teeth out. Cool. But anything beyond that I feel is compromising the integrity of the character and I’m not willing to do that. You’ve got to trust me. You’ve got to let me do what you hired me to do and if you’re not happy with doing that, then you’ve got to replace me.”
How did you develop your walk?
The way I walked, well, it was a couple of things. To me, it was like this guy who had spent a very, very long time on the ocean battling the elements. It was a guy who had spent way too much time in the sun, so maybe his brain was literally cooked a bit. And he was way more comfortable on the deck of a ship in terms of the rhythm of the ocean than he was on dry land. And I think he would also be a guy who would understand that, like he could take that and use it to his advantage, as if to hypnotize someone. He’d kind of go back and forth and hypnotize them, kind of like a cobra, moving target. So, that’s where it came from. I thought he would hate being on land. Read More >
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