{"id":1270,"date":"2008-01-25T17:19:09","date_gmt":"2008-01-25T17:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=1270"},"modified":"2008-01-25T17:19:09","modified_gmt":"2008-01-25T17:19:09","slug":"johnny_depp_rocks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2008\/01\/25\/johnny_depp_rocks\/","title":{"rendered":"Johnny Depp Rocks"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hard to believe now, but there was a time, a very long time ago, when I couldn’t stand<\/i> Johnny Depp. I thought he was a no-talent pretty boy with greasy, stupid-looking hair and lousy taste in clothes<\/a>. Of course, a lot of this enmity probably stemmed from the way my girlfriend at the time got all dewy every time she saw a commercial for 21 Jump Street<\/i><\/a>. You see, I was painfully aware of how very, very un-Depp-like I was — I was much more along the lines of his Jump Street<\/i> co-star Peter DeLuise<\/a> in build, style, and attitude — and, well, teenage males of the species have a tendency to turn jealousy into hostility, often with a layer of homophobia for good effect. That’s why I denounced all the members of Duran Duran as “fags” (even though I wasn’t exactly clear on what a fag was, or why it was so bad to be one), and that’s why I really<\/i> hated Johnny Depp. (Don’t even get me started on Richard Greico<\/a> and his shaved eyebrows<\/a>!)<\/p>\n

I was perfectly content with my Johnny-Depp-sucks paradigm. No, really, it was working for me. But then he had to go and star in Edward Scissorhands<\/i>, which was directed by the guy who made Batman<\/i> so you know I just had<\/i> to see it, and wouldn’t you know it, Depp was actually pretty good in it, damn him. And then he just kept making movies I liked, or at least movies in which I liked him<\/i>. He wasn’t afraid to choose roles that made him look weird or unsavory or unsympathetic or wussy, and I could respect that. And he could actually act<\/i>, too, and he proved it by trying not to do the same type of role twice, which, again, I really respected. And gradually, movie by movie, performance by performance, he wore me down. (To tell the truth, it really didn’t take that long; breaking up with that girl who made me feel second-best to a TV character accelerated the process considerably, and by the time Ed Wood<\/i> opened in ’94, I was, if not an actual Depp fan<\/i>, at least comfortable saying I wanted to see his new movie.)<\/p>\n

These days, post-Pirates<\/i>, I’m fully recovered from my adolescent insecurity and Johnny Depp now holds a high position on my short-list of favorite actors. And you know what? The more I learn about what he’s like off-screen, the more I think he probably ought to be on my short-list of favorite people<\/i>, too, because he strikes me as one damn cool cat. For instance, did you hear the story<\/a> of how he donated a million pounds to the hospital where his daughter was treated a year ago for a potentially fatal case of E. coli<\/i>? And this was after inviting five of the doctors and nurses from the hospital — I presume they were the ones who actually treated his little girl — to the London premiere of Sweeney Todd<\/i> (which he’d been working on when she got sick). And then — and here’s the part that really impressed me — he quietly spent four hours at the hospital in character and full costume<\/i> as Captain Jack Sparrow, reading stories to sick kids. There were no news cameras or paparazzi around, and the event doesn’t seem to have been widely reported; it wasn’t about getting some good PR in advance of the next big film opening. It was just a kindly thing to do in an attempt to show some gratitude.<\/p>\n

These days when so many of the people in the public eye seem hell-bent on behaving as outrageously as possible, it’s so refreshing to hear about a wealthy celebrity performing a simple little act of human decency.<\/p>\n

Via<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hard to believe now, but there was a time, a very long time ago, when I couldn’t stand Johnny Depp. I thought he was a no-talent pretty boy with greasy, stupid-looking hair and lousy taste in clothes. Of course, a lot of this enmity probably stemmed from the way my girlfriend at the time got […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}