Johnny Depp turns 50. He is more popular than any other movie star, although he often tells nonsense and his films are becoming increasingly bland. How does the man do it?
What people say about Johnny Depp: "He's kind of a modern vagabond." Also: "This man really lives it; the bohemian." Or: "He's the most humble superstar we have." And: "He's not getting older, just cooler."
What Johnny Depp himself says: "I love wines, I consider them the elixir of the gods!" And: "Being photographed feels like rape." Or: "Innocence and purity, yes, these topics fascinate me..." What all this reveals: Somehow, over the past few decades, an unplugged performance by Nirvana has turned into a ballad number by André Heller, accompanied by piano and oboe, without us, the audience, noticing. But hush, back to the beginning of the 1990s, when the world was waiting for a very specific song, his song.
Germany was busy with reunification, the first Iraq war was coming to an end. Men who were not named Helmut Kohl or George W. Bush grew goatees, or goatees. Girls wore motorcycle boots, and everyone wore a lot of black leather and much too thick cross pendants and skulls slung around extremities and listened to the new Vanessa Paradis record, which had been found stupid and embarrassing until the then sacrosanct Lenny Kravitz came in, Vanessa Paradis black leather and then you composed that record. . .
As it turned out during those days, the director John Waters had done the American teen star Johnny Depp a priceless service: He had cast him in his film "Cry Baby", a parody of teen stars, and with it (self-irony and insight! Development! ) opened the gateway to growing up in Hollywood. Shortly thereafter, he appeared as a great eccentric in a film by Tim Burton, for which no average cinema-goer would have any more understanding, the will to abstract or even just patience, because Depp played an artificially created being who lived in a suburb from no closer clarified circumstances in a black leather suit, wore the same hairstyle as the The Cure singer Robert Smith and had to deal with scissors instead of hands. Well, and what can we say today: Back then, these two films were not only worldwide successes, they literally triggered hysteria. Now he was there; the hit called Johnny Depp.
In Lasse Hallström's drama "Gilbert Grape - Somewhere in Iowa" he later played Gilbert, a country boy who has to deal with a monstrously fat, single mother and a disabled brother. And that was it, order returned, the teenagers of this world sorted themselves out. One to Team Brad Pitt, the other to Team Johnny Depp. Whereby in Depp's team the weird ones, the lame and the boys also played, which of course would make them superior in terms of numbers. And with their help, today and 20 years later, Depp was able to outstrip everyone else: Brad Pitt eh. Tom Cruise too, even Tom Hanks.
Of all Hollywood stars, Depp is the most successful, which nowadays is synonymous with: the richest (despite three nominations, he has not yet won an Oscar). At the same time, he is the one who is loved most unconditionally, which is actually the only weird thing now. Because no matter how grotesque his fee is increased with each new sequel of "Pirates of the Caribbean", no matter how silly his films get - and for ten or fifteen years they have either been very silly or there is too much singing - Depp does not trigger envy bite reflexes. On the contrary.
