Every film career faces its fair share of ups and downs, with Johnny Depp experiencing a rise and fall so swift and sudden in each respect that it’s enough to give anybody whiplash.
Kicking off his acting career on the right foot, Depp nabbed early roles in Wes Craven’s classic supernatural slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street and Oliver Stone’s ‘Best Picture’ winner Platoon, having only gotten into acting when his band failed to take off, and Nicolas Cage helped get him an audition.
When he secured the breakthrough role that propelled him to mainstream stardom and household name status several years later on the TV series 21 Jump Street, he grew to despise it. Depp wanted to be a known and respected actor, not a teenage heartthrob and ultimately extricated himself from his contract to skip out on the show’s final season and try his luck in cinema.
That ended up going pretty well, with Depp’s first major leading role in a motion picture coming in Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, which got him on the Golden Globes shortlist for ‘Best Actor – Musical or Comedy’. From there, he teamed up with the maverick John Waters for the musical romance Cry-Baby, declaring that he wanted to spend the rest of his career working with a filmmaker he’d never work with again.
Firmly established as the handsome face of independent eccentricity by the 1990s, Jack Sparrow strapped a rocket to Depp’s back in 2003 when Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl netted him his first Academy Award nomination, launched him onto the A-list, spawned a lucrative franchise, and helped make him the single highest-paid actor in the industry.
Of course, it’s been a long time since Depp reached those lofty heights, but even when his star was shining at its brightest, he remained susceptible to an existential crisis. Burton’s Alice in Wonderland took everyone by surprise when it blasted past a billion dollars at the box office, and yet, the actor still couldn’t believe his career continued going from strength to strength.
“Truly, I felt after I had done Cry-Baby with John Waters and Edward Scissorhands with Tim that they were going to cut me off right then, you know what I mean?” he told Radio Free. “I had felt at that point I was on solid ground and I knew where I was going and where I wanted to go, and I was sure that they would nix me out of the gig.”
Stumbling upon his favourite recurring collaborator and an eccentric auteur he instantly fell in love with so early placed Depp under the impression that Edward Scissorhands and Cry-Baby were as good as it was ever going to get. To be fair, they still rank among the best and most popular movies he’s ever been in, even if the paycheques continued growing exponentially larger in the years to come.
