The Face, July 1991
By Jim MacClellan
Photos by Albert Sanchez

The other half of Hollywood's hippest couple, Johnny Depp is better known here as Winona Ryder's boyfriend. Now with Edward Scissorhands, their first film together he also shows he can act: but it's not a pretty sight...

'My lips are fucked.' Johnny Depp groans and reaches for some vitamin E cream. He’s right. His pretty-boy pout is in trouble. Dry and cracked, burnt red raw in places. The result of another day's work in the boiling hot 100-degree centre of nowheresville, Arizona. Depp's here to shoot the Arrowtooth Waltz, a magically off-beat coming-of-age comedy which also stars Jerry Lewis and Faye Dunaway, and the first American film by Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica of Time of the Gypsies fame. The last outpost of civilisation - a one laundromat, two-street town called Patagonia - is an hour's drive away. Along with his blasted lips, it's another indication of just how far Johnny Depp will go to leave behind the heart-throb image given to him by the US TV cop show 21 Jump Street.

In last year's Cry Baby, he let John Waters have his wicked way with him. In Tim Burton's upcoming Edward Scissorhands, he wears a Robert Smith wig and hides his face behind white paint and scars. Yesterday, he was stuck in the hottest spot in a very hot place, on top of a ranch house in the middle of sun-smoked stretch of prairie, doing reaction shots as a micro light biplane looped and swerved a few feet over his head. Today, he's been repeatedly pushed at a barn door while perched on top of a bicycle with wings. There are several more weeks of surreal routines and slow dehydration to come. 'Since I've been in Arizona, I've had dry lips, dry hands. Everything's so dry. The cowboys must have been masses of flaking chafing skin.'

It's probably worth the pain - the film, in which Depp plays an innocent on the run from the 'real world' of his uncles Cadillac dealership - sounds great. Anyway, he wears his battle scars pretty well. Pre-pubescent fans might disagree, but he looks even better dried up. And though the sun may have cracked his lips, it's thankfully left his mind, or rather his temper, alone.

There have been reports that Depp has been 'difficult' in the past, but there's no sign of that today. Cooling off in his trailer, crunching a rock-hard Snickers bar straight from the freezer in between frequent cigarettes, he's charm himself, apologising for delays and introducing me first to hi pet pig, then to Faye Dunaway.
(The pig ignored me, Faye Dunaway shook my hand, offered me a sweet she'd just made, and asked me earnestly what was happening in London.)

Relaxed and thoughtful, down to earth, and possessed of a sense of humour that, like everything else, is dry, he chats affably about favourite books (the Beats, Salinger, Hunter S. Thompson, John Fante's appropriately named Ask the Dust), his favourite actors (Richard E. Grant - rates highly), even his one go in a flotation tank ('I felt asleep, then I woke up, couldn't feel the door and panicked.') But the main topic of the conversation is Edward Scissorhands, out here at the end of the month. In his second starring role, Depp plays the eponymous Edward, a leather-clad boy robot whose inventor/father (Vincent Price) dies before finishing him off, leaving him with bristling sets of scissors where his hands should be.

Rescued from his gothic castle home by Avon Lady Peg Boggs (Dianne West), Edward is transported to an abnormally normal archetypal TV suburbia of pastel-tinted exteriors and trimmed lawns, trash interiors of polyester daywear. There he cuts something of a figure, first as a hedge trimmer with big ideas, then as a high rise hairdresser. Treated as an exotic real-life toy boy, passed around like a new consumer fad, patronised with a feel-good banality ('Son, you are not handicapped - you're gifted.'), Edward is desperate to fit in and win the heart of the blonde cheerleader Kim Boggs (Winona Ryder in a very unconvincing blonde wig). But in true, doomy fairy-tale style, the course of true love never runs smoothly.

Given that it's made by Tim Burton of Batman fame, Edward's cartoon visual excess, trashy surreal surfaces and balance of naive charm with dark intelligence should all come as no surprise. What does is how good Depp is. The talent for physical comedy that emerged in Cry Baby's campy slapstick, and is balanced by a calculated restraint and an affecting simplicity. Depp says that as soon as he read the script, he had to play the part. 'I connected with it really well. I sort of already knew the character and what he represented.
Edward seemed more a feeling than a person. The metaphor of the scissors is about wanting to touch, but if you touch, you destroy. Nothing you do seems right. It's the feeling you get when you're growing up, very adolescent. I felt that way. I think everybody did.'

Did he really base his portrayal of Edward on a dog? 'Kind of. It's like, if a dog is trying to please the master. It breaks something, you scold it, and it goes to the corner. But as soon as you call it, it comes right back. It forgets everything. There's this unconditional love. I thought Edward would be like that.'

SO did he go method and hang around kennels? 'No, but I did look at babies, to get the way Edward gazes at things.' He also watched old Chaplin films to get Edward's handicapped clockwork waddle, something accentuated by the restrictive leather body-suit he wore.

Pre-shoot practice with the scissors - which were actually plastic - helped him turn them into expressive instruments and avoid too many on-set accidents, although Anthony Michael Hall (the bad guy jock and Edward's competitor for Kim's affections) did get spiked twice. Depp apparently became adept enough with the clippers to hold his fag between takes. As to what else he managed to grip without a slip... is he getting tired of all the cracks about how Edward goes to the bathroom? He grins. 'That was the first thing I asked. No one could say. I decided he would sweat it out.' Not having that particular option, despite a shoot in Florida that was almost as hot as Arizona, Depp decided to cut down on his water consumption during filming.

He wasn't the studio's first choice for Edward. Tom Cruise was interested, but pulled out, allegedly worried by the character's lack of masculinity. 'I heard that', Depp smiles and shakes his head. 'What's Edward going to do - pull out on Uzi? I doubt Tom Cruise really thought that.' Certainly, it ´wouldn't fit with the film in which, as in most of Tim Burton's movies, 'real men' are grotesque, destructive or plain useless, like Bill Boggs, the suburban dad as human black hole, superbly played in the film by Alan Arkin. There were also suggestions that Cruise wanted Edward to be transformed at the end into a handsome young blade. 'That would have been a different movie. Let's just say I'm real glad they didn't pick Tom Cruise.'

One person who'd agree is Depp's fiancée Winona Ryder who became available to shoot Edward after falling ill on the set of Godfather III. It is the first film they've starred in together. What was it like playing opposite his wife-to-be? 'I was nervous. It's like another level of exposing yourself to someone. You know you can be together, but then to act together, be different people, especially someone like Edward... it was scary at first. She was nervous too. But it was great. Besides the fact that I love her and everything, she's a great actress, very giving and considerate. It was really easy working with her, because stuff automatically happens. You don't have to try. Stuff comes out.'

It goes without saying that Depp is a man in love. Visibly. His romance with Winona has been consummated and consumed in public. The details are well known. Their eyes met at the premiere of Great Balls Of Fire, but they didn't. A few months later they were introduced by a mutual friend. Going on for two years later, they're engaged and Depp has 'Winona Forever' tattooed on his arm.

The Hollywood publicity machine has always thrived on star romance, but it seems that in the post-Aids age, with Warren Beatty-style bedhopping publicly frowned don, big-name couples are a real item. Yet amid all the usual sleaze about Bruce and Demi and Julia and Kiefer, the youthful Depp and Ryder have been treated with kid gloves so far, cast as hip, romantic innocents. A recent fashion shoot in Vogue, which showed the couple embracing packaged them as a 'fairytale couple' - a symbol of Hollywood Romance -along with Pretty Woman and Green Card.

Not surprisingly, it irritated Depp to see his love-life diagnosed like a cultural symptom. Still, isn't he scared that once their press honeymoon is over, the scandal rags will go all out to break them up? 'We've already had rumours we're splitting up. Such bullshit. Things like People magazine don't really bother me - it's like the flies buzzing around this trailer. I can deal with their presence if I have to, but I'd much rather squash them like a pea'. Another problem they face are all the dodgy team-up scripts they get sent. 'They're so obvious. Like, they offered us a gangster movie together. I'm a mobster and Winona's my moll.'

Depp and Ryder seem so well-suited that you forget that she's 20 and she's nearly 28. Depp seems younger, in looks and attitude. In fact, he's difficult to place in time. Tim Burton says that Depp reminds him of the classic movie stars of the Thirties and Forties (in fact he's called Johnny and Winona a dark Tracy and Hepburn), yet with his Anglophile dress sense and tastes in music, he comes on like a post-punk hipster. Then, with his easy-going drawl and thoughtful cool, you start to think of him alongside the better actors on the fringes of the ageing Brat Pack. But he missed all that. Whereas Matt Dillon has nearly 20 films to his name. Depp has five or so.

The reason is that he was never a Hollywood teen. Growing up in Kentucky, then Florida, he never wanted to be an actor. 'I just wanted to play guitar'. He played in a local band, supporting acts like Iggy Pop, Talking Heads and the Ramones when they came to town. The band went to LA, but nothing came of it. So Depp tried his hand at acting in Nightmare on Elm Street, in which he suffered an iconic teenage death, eaten alive by his bed while listening to the stereo and watching TV at the same time. He followed up in 1986 with a stint as a grunt in Oliver Stone's Vietnam odyssey, Platoon. Then came 21 Jump Street, which took four years of his life.

A hysterical piece of Eighties trash, the show cast Depp as a baby-faced cop whose youthful looks allow him to work undercover in that den of iniquity, the high school, and dealt in stereotypical moral panics (school bully crack dealers). From a distance, it looks quite camp, it didn't at the time. Depp was so embarrassed by the show, he couldn't watch it. What irked most was being a teen heart-throb.

'I got angry because it wasn't me and I couldn't control it, all these publicity fuckers from Fox TV trying to market me like I was a box of cereal. In that position, it's up to you. You go with it, make more money than you could ever want, are really famous for two years. Or you fight it, I was lucky in that at least I had half a brain cell, so I fought it.'

Hence his reputation for being difficult. 'For myself, I felt it was kind of fascist thing to have undercover cops busting kids for half an ounce of weed. Like, he's a real bad kid, he needs a lot of therapy and time in jail to straighten out.' Depp has even used a cameo role in Elm Street 6 to work off his anti-Jump Street feelings. 'I'm a public service announcer on TV. I hold up this egg and say, 'Now this is your brain.' Then I crack it into a frying pan, it starts to sizzle and I say, 'That's your brain on drugs'. Then Freddie smashes me in the face with the pan. It says everything I wanted to say.'

So he won't be doing any more TV? 'I'd rather dig a hole through the centre of the earth with my tongue.'