Johnny Depp Was ‘Completely Freaked Out’ by Heartthrob Status as a Young Actor: ‘People Would Whisper’

Johnny Depp is looking back on the amount of media attention he received as a young man, in a new documentary about his frequent collaborator Tim Burton.

In the second episode of filmmaker Tara Wood’s four-part untitled documentary series on Beetlejuice director Burton, 66, Depp, 61, admitted he felt uncomfortable with his celebrity status, after archival footage of Burton showed the director describing Depp as “very much not” the sex symbol he was portrayed as in the media.

“I was completely freaked out by [fame],” Depp says in the documentary. “Paparazzi would take pictures of me. People would whisper and point their finger and stuff. I felt like sort of this raw nerve on display.”

Depp says elsewhere in his interviews for the series that he beat out Tom Cruise, among other actors, for the title role in 1990’s Edward Scissorhands, and that he saw a quick kinship form with Burton when they first met to discuss the movie.

“What I noticed the first time we met was he wasn’t saying very many words,” Depp said. “[Burton] would begin a sentence and I would go ‘Oh yeah,’ and then we would talk about Boris Karloff or something. We related on a lot of levels.”

“After about three-and-a-half hours of a really great yak with the guy, I still thought, ‘No chance, man. No chance,’ ” he recalled of vying for the Edward Scissorhands role.

Edward Scissorhands ultimately proved a hit for Burton and Depp, and the pair went on to collaborate on movies like 1994’s Ed Wood, 2005’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, 2007’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and more.

While discussing his performance as Edward Scissorhands, Depp said he realized after a certain point that the character was based on Burton’s own personality — and worried that he was acting poorly.

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“I was cast in the film but I was stepping into a kind of family that I hadn’t been totally brought into yet,” Depp said. “I was absolutely convinced that I was blowing it. Tim had rehearsed everyone else in the cast. Everyone. Not me. He didn’t rehearse me. He was excluding me from the cast and crew, isolating me.”

While Depp eventually realized Burton intentionally separated him from the movie’s cast during rehearsals to help him understand the loneliness his character experiences, he remembers his initial reaction to working on the movie as a frightening experience.

“It was scary. I was uber paranoid,” Depp recalled. “Why is [Burton] not rehearsing me? Maybe he trusts me. No he doesn’t. He doesn’t trust you, what are you nuts? He’s going to cast someone else, man.”

Filmmaker Wood’s documentary on Burton, which is seeking distribution, premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Festival; the series also features interviews with Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton, Helena Bonham Carter, Danny Elfman and more.

Source people.com