Johnny Depp was at the ZFF and rehabbed

He was there – a lot of what we wrote about Johnny Depp was probably stupid

The actor spoke to and in front of the Zurich audience for an hour at the ZFF and was so kind that we got a little embarrassed.

Sometimes you have to be critical of yourself. Sometimes you have to look at things with your own eyes and, above all, see things with your own ears and not just write what others think. Regardless of whether it is about people, places, events or works of art. Sometimes that would be journalism. Not the other. And it doesn’t hurt to admit it. Unless you consider that your own limits are insurmountable.

So let’s go to Johnny Depp. Literally, not symbolically. Because Johnny Depp shows up on the first Friday afternoon in October shortly after 1pm in room number 4 of the Arena cinema in Sihlcity. Talk to host Max Loong and the audience for an hour. And with Victoria, the wife of his good friend Shane MacGowan. Shane and Johnny have been friends for thirty years, and Shane is not just any friend, but the lead singer of the Irish folk punk band The Pogues, and if you haven’t played with the Pogues, you probably weren’t in the 80s or 90s. .

Johnny made a documentary about Shane called “Crock of Gold – A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan” and the rounds are of course rounds in a pub, so you see Johnny and Shane under the heavy influence of Ireland, drugs and them . old punk scene in london chat. It’s a bit like Johnny wants to confirm all the biases one already has about him in the movie, he, the well-leveled, worn wreck that hits his wife and otherwise has no control over himself.

But he did. Because now in Zurich a sober, kind-hearted, frankly irritatingly pleasant and humble man sits on stage, as always in black glasses and a beret, which at some point he throws on the ground and runs through his hair over and over again. His voice is deep, full and huge.

Music connects him to Shane, because Johnny once saw himself as a musician: “I started at twelve, I did my first nightclub gigs when I was thirteen and I made a living from it at fifteen,” he says, “ then I dropped out of school. because music was my first great love. “At some point someone came up with the idea that I was handsome enough for the camera,” I made some movies, I didn’t care, someone gave me money, I took it, but I didn’t It mattered, but suddenly I realized that the music of my life had been left in the back seat.

He decided to take the movie seriously. I want to be a punk rock actor. I don’t want applause for nice roles. “This turned into” Cry Baby “and” Edward Scissorhands, “” my agent was not happy, but the more I knelt, the less stupid my roles became. “Sometimes it is important that possibility Failure looms over you. Sometimes you have to be pushed into a corner so you can escape. “

And then at some point Shane came into his life, the drunken, junkie Irish poet who says in the movie that he couldn’t stand how good Johnny looked back then. Later, Depp says on stage, Shane simply called him “white trash” and his appearance was that of a pimp. Shane had spent the first six years on a farm, really on earth, with no toilets or electricity, his grandmother gave him beer and cigarettes for the first time when he was four, and he quickly became addicted to alcohol when the family moved to London. . , he became addicted, his parents preferred it when he consumed at home than on the street.

“When I met him, he was in what looked like a pub. He had a pint in one hand and he was making music with the other, he swayed like a very slow metronome, I thought he would only live a week, “says Depp in Zurich,” but he’s still alive. I immediately loved his music. There was rebellion in every song. There was truth in every song. ”How Shane found the movie about himself, he asks Victoria.“ Oh, you don’t want to know! ”He laughs.

He does not hide the fact that he himself drinks a lot and is very familiar with drugs. But that’s okay too. No one in Zurich talks about the trial with his ex-wife Amber Heard, but you sit there and think: it’s quite possible that she and he didn’t give each other anything in their drug-fueled marital war and became two who were at all. not doing good. Because the question of getting in is central to Johnny Depp’s approach to work.

“If someone tells me to down a gear, I go even higher,” he says, illustrating it with Jack Sparrow. “When Disney first saw me as Jack Sparrow, they were scared to death. They asked me: are you drunk? Is Jack Sparrow drunk? He is gay? I said, don’t you know that all my characters are gay? I believed in Jack Sparrow. I told him: if you pay me, you can fire me, I understand, or trust me. That happens to me a lot. But it encourages me. “

How does someone with such a loud voice get the crazy voices that they give their characters? Johnny Depp is in the element: “These voices are based on the ingredients that I serve a character with. To me, Grindelwald is a thin and fragile piece of glass. I want you to speak as if you are touching a glass of wine. And a bit like one of those television or political preachers who put you to sleep. “

Willy Wonka relies on the moderators of children’s shows. And when asked, what would George W. Bush sound like if he were totally high? What if it reached its highest point? I mixed that up. And with the Mad Hatter, he had a broken toy in mind. And a very specific orange glue that hatters used to work with that was so toxic that some of them went crazy. “

And then there is the issue of violence against women, but very different than expected. A woman stands up, says that she is an actress, that she wants to make a movie about rape, that she lived it herself, that she has lost everything, if he, Johnny Depp, who also works as a producer, wants to help her with that ?

Sure, what can I do for you? Wow, how brave they go down to that kind of horror for a movie. “Of course he won’t be able to do anything for her, but the brief conversation with the woman, which only the two of them understood, seemed to go well. And then he’s still happy with the Swiss chocolate of a fan and he stands up and applauds the people of Zurich who applaud him for much more than two seconds, looking like he has described his friend Shane to the audience: “Hey that’s a beating heart.” It is a beating heart. And his rhythm is punk rock.