Johnny Depp Scrooge interview France, Digi Mart USA News: Barely recognizable under his makeup, Johnny Depp plays one of the most despised characters in English literature. A few days before the November 11 release of “Scrooge” in cinemas, the American actor was the guest of TF1’s 20H newscast on Sunday, in an interview available in full above.
He discussed his portrayal of Charles Dickens’ miserly old man, as well as his career and his particular relationship with France. Asked about the pleasure of playing such an unpleasant character, the actor said one must “dig a little deeper to find the origin of that pain, as Dickens did.” “I deeply believe that Scrooge is simply hiding his heart away from the world.
His greatest fear is probably having his heart broken,” he said.
The film, an adaptation of the English novelist’s masterpiece, confronts its hero with his past mistakes and raises the question of redemption. “I don’t believe mistakes can be repaired,” he responded.
“I believe mistakes are kinds of bumps, bruises, scraped knees, small pieces of pain that you have to learn to feel and understand in order to live with them.”
To play Scrooge, the actor underwent a dramatic physical transformation through long makeup sessions. As a result, he appears in the film with a “prominent and bumpy” nose he had envisioned, a chin prosthetic, more “structure around the eyes and forehead,” and a “thinning skull.” “There’s something of the crow in him, something animal.
He’s not just a man with a bad back,” the actor said of Scrooge, quoting a line attributed to English writer Samuel Johnson: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
Once the character appeared in the mirror, he continued, “you slip into his clothes like armor. You truly become him.” Indeed, from Jack Sparrow to Edward Scissorhands to Willy Wonka, transformation roles punctuate his filmography.
“I love escaping. From the beginning, I thought it would be very boring to play myself every time.
I would have gone crazy,” he explained.
That fear of being trapped in an image dates back to his early career, when the series 21 Jump Street made him a teen idol. “They really tried to lock me into that role.
I was so young. It scared me so much it was almost at the level of panic, he recalled.
I really tried to get fired from that TV series for two years. But they never wanted to.”
Before cinema, however, there was the guitar, which the actor still plays with his band “Hollywood Vampires,” alongside Alice Cooper and Joe Perry. “I fell in love with music, and especially the guitar, when I held one in my hands for the first time.
It was instant. I was 12 years old,” he said.
Finally, there is his link with France, where he lived for several years with his then partner, Vanessa Paradis. “When I was younger, I had read Ernest Hemingway’s books and dreamed of that Paris of the 1920s.
I eventually went there for real, and it changed my life,” said the actor, who says he feels “as close to France as to the country where (he was) born.” Asked what he remembers of France when he is in the United States, he answered instantly: “Rillettes and baguettes.” “It’s his guilty pleasure,” he insisted.
