What makes Johnny Depp instantly recognisable in any one of his characters and at the same so different and unique?
Depp didn’t have formal training in drama before becoming an actor. In fact in had very few academic qualifications when he left high school at 15 to form his own band. He was fascinated by music and was given a guitar at the age of 12 years old - within a year he had mastered it on his own, and start playing his first gigs. And still plays: he is a musician as well as an actor and producer.
He learnt to tap into his subconscious and to manifest his characters out of his personal experiences.
He is also very well read, and I sense that he has tailored his own education according to his needs not from the generalised academic model that it is imposed on most of us.
Johnny has found life tough, at times almost unbearable, as a child and a teenager. His parents moved continuously, he had no time to adapt or to make himself feel at home before they were on the move again. There was also domestic violence as their relationship broke down and eventually his dad left.
Depp was a wild child and a challenging teenager. He self-harmed carving his own skin on occasions when the stress of family life was too much to bear; in his own admission he took every drug there was, and he shoplifted frequently with his friends. One of the things he took was a cords book from a music shop - with it he taught himself how to play the guitar.
He is shy, he hates having his photo taken, and finds his fans’ attention intrusive at times. He is extremely protective of his family. He is a self-confessed romantic, and although he had several relationship breakdowns he now has a close knit family life in France, with Vanessa Paradis, the mother of his children.
He has expressed strong views about America and its consumerism mentality, but he has often been forced to apologise and to justify his opinions.
He complains the media takes his statements out of context - and yet I get the feeling that there is indeed a very irreverent side to him…perhaps is his Red-Indian blood ancestry calling for justice. Depp’s grandmother was either from a Creek or a Cherokee tribe, and he has made many references to this blood connection, and recently played a tribe man: Tonto.
On a recent interview when asked if like his late friend the writer Hunter S. Thompson, he would also like to have his remains shot by a large cannon into the atmosphere, he joked that he would rather have then shot at one eye of the statue of Liberty.
Depp like most Hollywood actors has made a large amount of money which he has used to surround himself and his young family with privacy: he bought a private island, and he has also employed a team of heavy handed bodyguards. He's reacted violently when provoked by paparazzi and has been briefly arrested a couple of times.
His appearance and personal style is unkempt, well warn but much loved jeans and boots, and long hair - he plays with it when his not comfortable with the excessive applause and screaming from his fans. He has admitted that the long hair works like a curtain allowing himself not to be seen when it all gets too much. He also has a versatile collection of hats and other head gear. Oh and several tattoos, some meaningful like the Indian head in honour of his grandmother, and Betty Sue - his mother's name. Other seem to be a bit of hit and miss, like Wino Forever which used to read Winona Forever when he was engaged to Winona Ryder but that latter he decided that he preferred to call himself a wino even thought that he isn't than to have her name forever grafted on his skin...there is also a number 3 on his hand, done by a friend while he was asleep for no apparent reason.
When he is acting, he metamorphes with the character, they become one. He has spoken of channelling his characters, he has also mentioned entering parallel realities, he has described his way of acting as a form of schizophrenia.
His first significant role was Edward Scissorhands and since then he has treated us to a kaleidoscope of ever changing aspects of himself
Normally I distinguish between the actor’s own personality and the characters they play, but in Depp’s case, he has made it clear that this distinction doesn’t exist, and that the characters he plays are all different aspects of himself.
In all his roles no matter how diverse they are we are constantly treated to a touch of eccentricity and geniality, threatened by a sense of impending danger, danger that his character twittering on the edge between insanity and normality might end up loosing it completely, might become a mass murder, might coalesce out of the silver screen to get us…
Johnny Depp Talking about…
Growing up
“I can remember my parents fighting and us kids wondering who was going to go with whom if they got divorced.”
“We moved like gypsies. From the time I was five until my teens we lived in 30 or 40 different houses. That probably has a lot to do with my transient life now. But it's how I was raised so I thought there was nothing abnormal about it. Wherever the family is, that's home.”
“I grew up feeling like an obtuse piece of machinery. I hung around with bad crowds. We used to break and enter places. We'd break into the school and destroy a room or something. I used to steal things from stores.
I started smoking at 12, lost my virginity at 13 and did every kind of drug there was by 14. Pretty much any drug you can name, I've done it. I wouldn't say I was bad or malicious, I was just curious.”
“I remember carving my initials on my arm and I've scarred myself from time to time since then. In a way your body is a journal and the scars are sort of entries in it.”
“As a teenager I was so insecure. I was the type of guy that never fitted in because he never dared to choose. I was convinced I had absolutely no talent at all. For nothing. And that thought took away all my ambition, too.”
Becoming a father
“Anything I've done up till 27 May, 1999 was kind of an illusion, existing without living. My daughter, the birth of my daughter, gave me life.”
“Having kids was a huge change for me. Becoming a father. But I think more than changing, I feel like I've been revealed to myself, I kind of found out who I was. When you meet your child for the first time and you're looking at this angel, you start realizing what an idiot you've been for so many years and how much time you've wasted. “
The pressure of being in the public eye
“You use your money to buy privacy because during most of your life you aren't allowed to be normal.”
“The only gossip I'm interested in is things from the Weekly World News - 'Woman's bra bursts, 11 injured.' That kind of thing.”
“This is a rumor-filled society and if people want to sit around and talk about whom I've dated, then I'd say they have a lot of spare time and should consider other topics... or masturbation.”
“If there's anything I really want, it's privacy. You do get to where your money can help your family, and that's a great thing. You can buy that wristwatch you want, too. But mostly you now have to pay for simplicity. You use your money to buy privacy because during most of your life you aren't allowed to be normal. You're on display, always looked at, which puts you at a disadvantage for the people looking at you know that it's you. They say, "It's you!" But you don't know them. That's bad for an actor because the most important thing you can do is observe people. And now you can't because you're the one being observed.”
On acting
“I don't pretend to be captain weird. I just do what I do.”
“With any part you play, there is a certain amount of yourself in it. There has to be, otherwise it's just not acting. It's lying.”
“The character I've played, that I've responded to, there has been a lost-soul quality to them.”
“The term "serious actor" is kind of an oxymoron, isn't it? Like "Republican party" or "aeroplane food".”
“On a film you start to get closer and closer with the people you're working with, and it becomes like this circus act or this travelling family.”
On being dragged behind a carriage in the woods on "Sleepy Hollow" (1999): “I wasn't afraid of getting hurt. I was just afraid that the horses may relieve themselves on the journey.”
“Sure, I find it touching, honestly, but awards are not as important to me as when I meet a ten-year-old kid who says, "I love Captain Jack Sparrow" . . . that's real magic for me.”
“I think it's an actor's responsibility to change every time. Not only for himself and the people he's working with, but for the audience. If you just go out and deliver the same dish every time . . . it's meat loaf again . . . you'd get bored. I'd get bored.”
“I got sick. I went to see dailies on Nightmare on Elm Street. I was 21, and didn't know what was going on. It was like looking in a huge mirror. It wasn't how I looked that bothered me, though I did look like a geek in that movie. It was seeing myself up there pretending.”
Unconditional love
“The only creatures that are evolved enough to convey pure love are dogs and infants.”
“These are the most important people in my life. You know, I would die for these people. If someone were to harm my family or a friend or somebody I love - I would eat them. I might end up in jail for 500 years - but I would eat them.”
Grounding
“As far as being feet-on-the-ground, once again my kids and my girlfriend (Vanessa Paradis) have given me a proper foundation. A sense of home that I never had in my life, a real sense of a place to be.”
“I pray on aeroplanes. I get instant religion during takeoff, then when we're safely in the air I sit there thinking about the fact that any little thing that goes wrong could send us crashing to the ground.”
Food
"I'm not sure I could give up pork. Steak, OK. Maybe hamburgers. But nothing in the world can make me stop eating swine. I mean, I had a great-grandmother, Mimmy, who ate the greasiest food you ever saw and chewed tobacco till the day she died, and she lived to be 102."
Trying to define who he is
“Am I a romantic? I've seen Wuthering Heights (1939) ten times. I'm a romantic.”
When asked by James Lipton on "Inside the Actors Studio" what attracts him to funny hats: “I don't know, maybe I just read too much Dr Seuss as a kid.”
“I'm shy, paranoid, whatever word you want to use. I hate fame. I've done everything I can to avoid it.”
“I loved playing "Edward Scissorhands" (1990) because there's nothing cynical, jaded or impure about him. It's almost a letdown to look in the mirror and realise I'm not Edward.”
“There's a drive in me that won't allow me to do certain things that are easy. I can weigh all the options, but there's always one thing that goes: "Johnny, this is the one."
And it's always the most difficult - it's always the one that will cause the most trouble.”
Plans for the future
“I'm an old-fashioned guy . . . I want to be an old man with a beer belly sitting on a porch, looking at a lake or something.”
“I suppose nowadays it's all a question of surgery, isn't it? Of course the notion is beautiful, the idea of staying a boy and a child forever, and I think you can. I have known plenty of people who, in their later years, had the energy of children and the kind of curiosity and fascination with things like little children. I think we can keep that, and I think it's important to keep that part of staying young. But I also think it's great fun growing old.”
“If you turn on the television and see the horrors that are happening to people in the world right now, I think there's no better time to strive to have some kind of hope through imagination. I think it's a time to close your eyes and try to make a change, or at least hope to make a change, or we're going to explode.”
Breathing, the rhythm of life:
“My sister Christi had a baby when I was 17, and I had just heard about crib death. The horrible thing was that it wasn't understood. For some unknown reason the baby would stop breathing. So I would sneak into where the baby was sleeping and put my hand in her crib, hold her little finger, and I'd sleep on the floor like that. It was stupid, I'm sure. But I thought the warmth of my hand might help, that maybe if she felt my pulse it would remind her to breathe.”
On an interview in “Inside actors” he was asked what turns him on, he replied: “Breathing”.
He has also mentioned spending time living with Romanian Gypsies when he was researching for his movie “Chocolate”, and how they taught him the value of every breath, every minute, every moment in life.
Music
“There's nothing - you know - nothing else like music. Nothing that touches us on that, uh, that deep level. Music can open up so many emotions that we didn't know we had. It's the magical thing about musicals, you know, on the stage or on film or whatever. Love songs. They work so well because music touches us, emotionally, where words alone can't.”
The separate sections of an individual
Depp explained that the lines of paint on his Lone Ranger character Tonto. The Native American’s face looked to him like a cross-section of the man’s emotional life. “There’s this very wise quarter, a very tortured and hurt section, an angry and rageful section, and a very understanding and unique side. I saw these parts, almost like dissecting a brain, these slivers of the individual.”
Johnny Depp's Homeopathic remedy is Anhalonium Lewiini
Peyote cactus by Uri Tear, flickr.com
Anhalonium also known as Peyote is a cactus without spines, native of Mexico and widely in Shamanic initiate rituals both in Mexico and in North America.
The ritual involves a group of tribe men guided by their Shaman, also known as “Roadman” who leads the “Peyote hunt”.
In order to go on this journey the participants are first requested to go through a strict program of purification both physical and spiritual. They act as a group and the welfare of each member is essential if the group is to succeed in their quest.
Mescaline, the active hallucinogenic ingredient in peyote, promotes a sense of fellowship that even those left at home, normally the women, are requested to observe the same purification rituals and to abstain from certain foods in order to share the experience of those on the journey.
Peyote was widely experimented with by the intellectual and artistic circles of the late 19th and early 20th century, and there are some very interesting narratives about their experiences. Antonin Artaud has given as a good account of his experience with Mescaline in: “the peyote dance”.
Walt Disney wanting to put into film his experiences with Peyote - gave us “Fantasia.”
It has similar visual hallucinations to LSD although some experts claim that LSD is more cerebral and Anhalonium is more hearty and earthy.
In the homeopathic potency this remedy is heart centred but it has also a strong action upon the nervous system.
The intake of material substance either through eating the Peyote buttons or by drinking the decoction induces synaesthesia (sounds are perceived as colours), two dimensional pictures appear to be three dimensional objects and they also appear to be framed on a halo of blue light. On looking away the objects previously looked at appear to follow leaving a beautiful trail of colour of red and green colours behind them.
There is a sensation of floating in the air, and extreme sensitivity to music as if one could be carried by a musical note.
There can be a great heart expansion, a feel of heart opening and of emotionally and spirituality merging with others.
Some mystics have compared this experience to religious ecstasy, and have called Peyote nature’s incarnation of Christ for establishing a connection between nature and the spitirual world.
After taking this drug it doesn’t seem to be a “come down” as with most other hallucinogenic just a great sense of lightness, of enlightenment and peace - as if he user has spread out through the universe.
For the full effect of Peyote to be felt the user has to be in perfect health so unlike with most drugs which seem to work strongly on a weaker system binding themselves to the users nervous system and causing habituation, Peyote doesn’t cause addiction: the user doesn’t feel a need to repeat the experience.
There are however cases where the drug has caused personality fragmentation and induced schizophrenia, particularly catatonic schizophrenia and hebephrenic schizophrenia.
The homeopathic Anhalonium has therefore been used to treat psychosis where there is a sense of separation from reality, a strong awareness of living in parallel realities at once, a loss of spatial and/or time awareness, as well as in shut down psychological states such as catatonia have been the main theme.
It is also a remedy used to treat migraines and headaches where there are visual disturbances consistent with colourful hallucinations experienced by the use of Peyote.
Anhalonium is also one of the remedies used in the treatment of certain forms of myopia and of astigmatism. Also an important remedy for some cardiac and respiratory symptoms.
Johnny Depp is Hollywood’s Roadman:
Leading us through a journey of colourful characters in a kaleidoscopic succession of multiple realities, revealing a very deep and very rich collective subconscious, helping us to integrate our own experiences within this discovery process. A collective journey that I hope he will lead for a long time, as there are a lot more of his creative genius and deep buried subconscious that needs to surface in order to be healed.
By the Undercover Homeopath
