When Johnny comes sailing home

No other actor could have done justice to Jack Sparrow role

How we love Johnny Depp: his unkempt good looks, his aura of vaguely rehabilitated naughtiness, his determination to keep his name below the title, so you never really know what a Johnny Depp movie might be. Director Tim Burton calls him a character actor in a leading mans body.

And how we love Jack Sparrow, unregenerate coward, egotistical scoundrel, amoral buccaneer determined to beat the devil with a combination of betrayal, speed and good luck; outlaw of questionable sexuality and intermittent
sobriety. Hes the anti-hero who has leered his way through two blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean movies with a third, At Worlds End, coming May 25 that are rousing, messy, gallant and pansexual. Call them swishbucklers.

It was a marriage made in Hollywood heaven, and it paid off: Oscar nominations for the first Pirates film, $1 billion in worldwide box office receipts for the second, and guaranteed lineups for the third. And not so incidentally, they have made a genuine movie star out of Depp, who is being dragged kicking if not screaming into the limelight and out of a forced attempt at obscurity (he chooses chancy projects; he lives in France; he insisted on turning Jack Sparrow into what he calls a combination of Keith Richards and Pepe Le Pew, a choice that had Disney executives rattled and uncertain, at least until the opening-day receipts were counted.)

It might not have worked with any other star. Depp was an inspired choice. Imagine how Brat Pitt, say, could have turned the role into an unregenerate hunk, or how the sensitive sincerity of a Jake Gyllenhaal or a Heath Ledger could have spoiled all the knavish fun. Depp, the former teen idol (21 Jump Street) is a heartthrob, but a quirky one: a mincing director in Ed Wood, an ethereal man-child in Edward Scissorhands, a feathery ladies man in Don Juan DeMarco. He was nominated for an Oscar for the first Pirates movie and immediately followed it up with a second Oscar-nominated performance, this time as another perpetual adolescent in Finding Neverland.

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