Johnny Depp: ‘My mother beat me with a stick, a shoe, an ashtray. I learnt how not to raise kids'

Telegraph

11 hours ago

The first time I see Johnny Depp, he is holed up in a caravan on a Budapest backstreet. Smoking a roll-up, wearing a woollen cap, and hunkered down over a script, the troubled Hollywood star is attempting to do something he hasn't done in 20 years: direct a film.
Modì: Three Days on the Wing of Madness is a biographical snapshot of the Italian artist, set in Paris between the wars. As a piece of film-making it is compellingly chaotic; a quality reflected in both its subject and its harum-scarum director.
The film, which will be released on Friday July 11, also marks a big next step for Depp: it is his first work of any substance since he was, in his own words, 'shunned, dumped, booted, deep-sixed, cancelled – however you want to define it,' by Hollywood after potentially career-ending allegations were made by his ex-wife, Amber Heard, during a succession of trials that aired some very dirty laundry in courts on both sides of the Atlantic.
To recap, Depp and Heard, an actress 22 years his junior, married in 2015 and then divorced a year later. Heard claimed that Depp had abused her physically, an allegation he denied. A year later Depp sued The Sun for an article that labelled him a 'wife beater'. The judge ruled against Depp. Then in 2018, Heard wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that referred to 'sexual violence' and 'domestic abuse' without naming Depp. He sued for defamation, leading to a 2022 trial in Virginia that Depp won.
A cynic might suggest that taking the reins of an art-house project like Modigliani is the calculated act of a 62-year-old man keen to shift focus off his personal life and back on to his work. Yet, everyone I speak to on set in Budapest suggests this is not the case, that Depp the director is driven by passion not strategy.
'Johnny loves risk,' says Riccardo Scamarcio, the Italian actor who plays the lead role in Modigliani. 'He knows that real creativity comes hand in hand with the danger that you can fall down.'
Al Pacino, who is one of the film's producers and appears in it as an American art collector, tells me that ever since he and Depp first worked together on the crime drama Donnie Brasco (1997) there's been an understanding between them. 'I've kept up with his work and artistry through the years and just knew he had the right instruments and creative acumen to suit the very essence of this film in order to direct it,' he says.
On set in Budapest, we are introduced only briefly. But recently, in London, Depp and I meet again, this time in a Soho bolthole that is serving as his temporary base while he works on the editing and post-production of the film. It also appears to function as an ad hoc studio for his painting and music-making, and has the feel of a secret hideout.
When I walk in, my eye is immediately drawn to a gigantic wine glass sitting in the window. On the side, someone has scrawled the words 'mega f---ing pint'.
From his perch behind a desk, surrounded by canvases, guitars and vintage bric-a-brac, Depp catches me staring. 'That,' he says, 'might be the closest to art that I've ever gotten'. It suggests that, whatever else he says, his three years of very public court proceedings – which followed a loose trajectory from humiliation through to a form of vindication – have left their mark.
The 'mega pint' is a reference to an episode in which Heard's lawyer asked Depp a question about a video which appeared to show him destroying cupboards while drinking a large glass of wine. When the lawyer described the glass as a 'mega pint', Depp couldn't hold back a smile – and an internet-breaking meme was born.
In conversation today, Depp growls and mutters: at times he skirts close to incoherence; at others, he makes magnetic, amusing company. He is keen to talk more about the film, and his unconventional approach to casting it. 'I cast Riccardo first, based on a photograph,' he says. 'His eyes reminded me of Oliver Reed. I f---ing love Oliver Reed. He was dangerous and he was funny and he was cool. So I went, 'That's the dude [for Modigliani].''
His gamble paid off; Scamarcio is excellent in the film. Depp says now that he only agreed to direct because his old friend Pacino had asked him to. 'I told him I ain't a director per se but I'll give it a shot. I mean he's nuts and he knows that I'm nuts.' But Depp also saw a kindred spirit in Modigliani – the troubled, hard-living, misunderstood artist. He takes me through a brief biography – he knows his stuff – before coming back, as he often does, to his late friend, the writer Hunter S Thompson.
'Hunter used that quote from Dr Johnson at the beginning of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: 'He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.' That's the definition of Hunter and it's the definition of Modigliani.'
The statement hangs in the air for a second before Depp jumps in with a hasty clarification. 'It's not that men are more in pain, but just in general,' he adds. 'You can apply it to a woman too, of course.'
For though Depp can meander, he is not un-self-aware. He knows that the long-running skirmishes with Heard painted him as misogynistic, violent and drunk – the man who had it all exhibiting all the worst traits of the over-entitled alpha male. He also knows that, had he wanted to, he could have stepped out of the limelight for good, played his guitars, done his art, opted for the quiet life. With decades of film-making behind him, as he says, 'I don't have anything to prove'.
So why on earth is he taking the risk of putting himself out there again? One explanation is that, as he says himself, he's 'nuts'. But it seems more likely that it's because there's a streak in Depp that cannot resist inviting trouble. He describes his experience on 21 Jump Street, the American cop show that first brought him fame in the late 1980s. It made him an instant teen idol but he was soon feeling boxed-in by the multi-series contract and chafing against being 'considered to be a TV actor, which was the last thing I wanted'.
He recalls how, in the early 1990s, he was asked by an interviewer why American kids should pay any attention to a young actor playing an undercover cop busting drug gangs. 'And I said, 'Well, that's easy. 'Cause I started taking drugs when I was about 11.' And then I went through the whole thing. And she asked me, have you tried marijuana? I went uh-huh. Cocaine? Uh-huh. Heroin? Uh-huh. I mean you name it because that's how I grew up. By the time I was 15, 16, I had a pretty decent chance at a doctorate in pharmacology and alcohol mixing and drinking.'
That probably wasn't a great career move, but what he couldn't stand, he says, was people trying to make him into something he wasn't. 'I didn't like the labels. What they were desperate to do was just make me a poster boy: 'He's the new James Dean.' No, I'm not.'
Of course, Depp soon shrugged off those labels, and left television behind to become one of the biggest film stars of his generation, nominated three times for the Best Actor Oscar. Mike Newell's Donnie Brasco, a series of memorable collaborations with Tim Burton (Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) and perhaps, above all, a career-defining role channelling Keith Richards as Captain Jack Sparrow in Disney's blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean films, which earned him many millions of dollars and fans. Through it all, however, a major part of the Depp persona has been a punk-rock attitude. He doesn't care what people think, and he wants you to know that.
'Listen, they've said all kinds of things out there in the world about me, and it doesn't bother me. I'm not running for office.' But, I say, surely it starts to matter when what people are saying stops you from doing the work you want to do? In 2020, after he lost his libel case against News Group Newspapers, he was dropped from the third film in the Harry Potter spin-off Fantastic Beasts franchise. He was replaced by the Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, having filmed just one scene.
'It literally stopped in a millisecond,' Depp says, 'like, while I was doing the movie. They said we'd like you to resign. But what was really in my head was they wanted me to retire'. His response? 'F--- you. There's far too many of me to kill. If you think you can hurt me more than I've already been hurt you're gravely mistaken.'
When I ask Depp what he means by already being hurt, he tells me about his mother, Betty Sue. Depp was born in Kentucky in 1963, the youngest of Betty Sue and her husband John Depp's four children. The family would often move around, eventually settling in south Florida when Johnny was seven. Betty Sue, who died in 2016 aged 81, was a waitress. She was also, Depp now says, violent and unpredictable.
'She beat me with a f------ stick, a f------ shoe, an ashtray, a phone, it didn't matter, man. But I thank her for that. She taught me how not to raise kids. Just do the exact opposite of what she did.'
When it came, fatherhood was not something he planned, Depp has said, being instead 'part of the wonderful ride I was on'. That ride began in the early 80s, when having dropped out of school, he moved to Los Angeles with his rock band and married Lori Anne Allison, the sister of his band's bassist. As a make-up artist, she inadvertently launched his film career by introducing him to Nicholas Cage (another actor who has documented his struggles with drink and drugs), with whom Depp would go out carousing. Cage recommended Depp for a bit part in the Wes Craven horror movie, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and without any experience, but with his famous good looks reportedly catching the eye of Craven's daughter, Depp won the part.
Soon his accidental career as an actor had overtaken his intended path as a musician, with his teen idol status enhanced by engagements (following his divorce from Allison) to stars Jennifer Grey (of Dirty Dancing) and Sherilyn Fenn (of Twin Peaks). His partnership with Burton, which started in 1990 with Edward Scissorhands, also led to Depp proposing to Winona Ryder, his co-star in the movie (famously, when their relationship foundered three years later, he had his tattoo reading 'Winona Forever' altered to 'Wino Forever').
Later, Depp dated the model Kate Moss and then the French singer Vanessa Paradis, with whom he had his two children, Lily-Rose, 26, also an actor, and Jack, 23, an artist and musician. He is now rumoured to be dating Russian model Yulia Vlasova, who is 33 years his junior.
Today he looks back on his 'wonderful ride' and acknowledges that much of it, especially recently, has not been so wonderful. But he says his tough childhood has also helped him develop a skin so thick that he has been able to brush off even the worst accusations slung at him in court. 'I've been accused of the deepest unpleasantries that you can be hit with. And for what reason? I think that's probably pretty clear,' he says, rubbing together finger and thumb in the international mime for money.
'This sounds like horses--- but one can simply hold hate [until it] inspires some species of malice in your skull. Makes you think of revenge. But hating someone is a great big responsibility to hang on to. The real truth of it, that I won't allow, is that in order for me to hate, I have to care first. And I don't care. What should I care about? That I got done wrong to [by others]? Plenty of people get done wrong.'
So why did he bother to fight those perceived wrongs in court? 'I fought it because had I not then I wouldn't have been me,' he says. 'Of course everyone tells you, 'Don't do it. You're crazy.'' But, he says, if the allegation made against him – 'a lie!' – of which he was cleared was going 'to be the deciding factor of whether or not I have the capability of making movies in Hollywood? F--- you'.
The longer Depp talks, the clearer it becomes that the trials of the past few years have left him somewhere between defiance and acceptance. Whatever the case, Depp appears once again capable of making movies in Hollywood.
This year, he looks set to embark on The Carnival at the End of Days, another collaboration with Terry Gilliam, who directed him in the 1998 film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Gilliam has cast him as Satan. Then there's Day Drinker, from The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb, in which Depp is reunited with Penelope Cruz, his former co-star in Blow; Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides; and Murder on the Orient Express.
At the height of the trial, when Heard's fans were baying for his blood, such a fully fledged return for Depp seemed almost inconceivable. So much time was lost on his legal battles; now he's eager to make up for it. 'Going through all that in real time amounted to seven or eight years,' he says. 'It was a harsh, painful internal journey. Would I rather not have gone through something like that? Absolutely. But I learnt far more than I ever dreamed I could.'