Here’s Johnny: battered heartthrob, struggling to escape the impression that a stellar career has dwindled and turned into a series of flamboyant caricature roles, from the rum-addled dandy Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean to the manic Mad Hatter in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and a fair few flops along the way.
Perhaps the sideways glances at his erratic choices have concentrated Depp’s quirky mind. In his latest film, Black Mass, directed by the relative newcomer Scott Cooper, he has turned back to the serious, as James “Whitey” Bulger, an especially chilly sociopath who ran Irish gangland in south Boston in the 1970s. Now even Depp-sceptics are talking about “Oscar bait”, a performance marking the long-awaited Depp comeback to meatier roles.
Pottering in, only marginally late by star time, to a Q&A session on the film in a London hotel, Depp mutters an apology that combines charm and evasion: “Sorry for my tardiness. It’s an illness: I’m working on it.”
He’s also unrecognisable from the character we have watched on screen for the previous two hours, slicing (often literally) and dicing his way through Boston’s bloody turf wars as head of the Winter Hill Gang. It took his hair, make-up and prosthetics consultants, he reckons, up to seven hours a day to get the look right: “It has to be very scary, but not a caricature.”
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Depp smiles as benevolently at his new directing protégé as his rust-coloured and stained false teeth allow. Acquired for Pirates (the fifth in the franchise will be released in 2017), they look immune from dental intervention.
Based on a book by two Boston Globe reporters, the Bulger story is a study in how the lowlife ethical codes of a tight-knit community infect the agencies whose job it is to control them. Depp tells me he wanted to make “an anti-gangster gangster movie”.
It’s also about complicity: Bulger’s brother Billy (a shifty Benedict Cumberbatch) was president of the Massachusetts Senate and turned a blind eye to his brother’s homicidal day job — while being lionised as a reformist Democrat.
Depp morning wear, since you ask, is Jack Sparrow redux: pirate scarf, a jangle of anchor necklaces, waistcoat, paint-spattered jeans in an advanced state of deconstruction and an elaborate new tattoo on a silver-ringed hand. Scuffed builders’ boots are muddy, which is mysterious, since he’s been disgorged from a pristine Merc, purring outside the hotel, and his main outing in London has been on the red carpet with his chiselled, Hitchcock-blonde actress wife, Amber Heard.
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As for his on-screen fraternal relationship with Cumberbatch, it was “instant brotherhood and love. I mean that!” The British actor’s rather mid-Atlantic stab at a Boston accent has been the subject of some ribbing, I remind Depp. “His accent is perfect — on the money,” protests the leading man.
It would not be true Deppery without some slightly unnerving moments throughout our interview. An anxiously long mid-sentence pause ensues when we discuss the co-star who plays an FBI agent, which makes everyone conclude that he might have forgotten Joel Edgerton’s name. The affable director, Cooper, fills it.
“Did you think I’d forgotten the guy’s name?” Depp asks, and proceeds to act out the whole scene again, his own mumbly pause and his team’s embarrassed reactions. The mix of mischief and a sliver of weariness is disarming.
These days, he’s swapped cigarettes for deep vaping from some artful contraption that looks like a mini-revolver. At 52, he’s kindly towards his colleagues and rather polite — giving way courteously if someone speaks at the same time and hanging around for selfie-seekers at the end of the screening.
Depp has, I note, returned to gangland, scene of some of his best work, from Donnie Brasco in 1997 to the seductive Public Enemies in 2009, in which he played the Depression-era outlaw John Dillinger. But Depp thinks his subject this time round is a tougher ask.
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“I found them very different to immerse myself in,” he says. “Dillinger had a kind of charm and ease when he wasn’t doing his violence; he was a very sociable guy people found attractive. Whitey Bulger has more layers of ice: the entire language of his work was violence.”
He studied accounts of Bulger’s modus operandi from his cronies in the Winter Hill Gang. “Standing particularly close to people was enough to intimidate them — he’d move in less than a foot away from someone he was talking to. It’s such a small trick, but it has a really scary effect. I freaked everyone out on set.”
The porous line between law enforcement and law-breaking is familiar territory for the actor. “When I made Donnie Brasco I would spend my day with the Feds and at night I would be hanging out with the mob guys. And the interesting thing I found was that there was no difference between them. Different game: yes. Personality wise: exactly the same.”
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The FBI would demur, citing Edgerton’s character John Connolly as one of the bad apples in its ranks.
The film has been criticised by one relative of a Bulger victim for Depp’s claim that he felt “compassion” for the main character, who was finally tracked down living under an alias in Santa Monica, California, in 2011 and is serving two consecutive life sentences plus five years for his grisly crimes.
“The compassion point,” mulls Depp. “It’s a hard question, but also an easy one for me to answer. I do feel compassion for Bulger. I know that sounds strange, because in his life he did horrific things to so many people.
“But as with any of us, you have to take the story all the way back. Both James and his brother Billy were beaten nearly to death by their father — a one-armed alcoholic. He was steeped in violence — from there and going to Alcatraz, no less, as a young man for his part in a heist.”
Yet there’s also an edge of grim comic absurdity that Depp relishes. “The guy went from [being] someone who was able to take naps after killing people at point-blank range to an elderly gentleman buying huge quantities of hand sanitiser.” (Lady Macbeth might not be so surprised.)
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“He ends up keeping $800,000 [£517,000] from a multimillion-dollar criminal empire in his living room wall, with a weapon in his wall. And his main activity in retirement was feeding cats.”
Having made headlines earlier last week by saying he didn’t care about awards, Depp gives me a less defiant take. “In fact, I would like to see this work recognised because this is the kind of work from a new generation we should be backing,” he says .
Filming in the streets that Bulger once ruled by the gun brought out “some tough people with a bizarre gaze” monitoring the action. “I stepped out of the trailer and there were guys who looked a lot like the people in the film, keeping an eye on what we were doing. I thought, ‘Well, you might be shot. You never know’. People of a certain age told me it was like seeing a ghost. That’s my best accolade.”
Anne McElvoy is on the staff of The Economist