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.
