Johnny Depp: ‘All My Characters Are Gay’

The actor, who apparently smoked hand-rolled cigarettes on stage throughout the talk to the shock of a few audience members, recounted nearly being fired from the first Pirates of the Caribbean film after Disney executives saw the first footage of him as Jack Sparrow.

He may be one of the most successful actors in the world, but Johnny Depp used to be awful at auditions.

‘It trickled back to me somehow that, “Goddammit, Johnny Depp’s ruining the film!”

Deep said he should not know what is supposed to happen and it should be much more organic than that.

‘All I could say was, cause they set me up with a great line, I said, ‘Well don’t you know all my characters are gay?’ I really expected to be fired, but I wasn’t for a few reason. “‘What the f*** are you doing?'” he remembered the person asking.

“I said, well, didn’t you know that all my characters are gay?” he explained.

Depp, whose plays convicted murderer and crime boss Whitey Bulger in his latest movie Black Mass, made plenty of other astonishing admissions during the hour-long discussion. While speaking at AFI Fest 2015 recently, he revealed that studio executives initially did not quite understand the version of Captain Jack Sparrow he had created, so they wanted to fire him.

He admitted: “I hate watching myself on screen”.

“Playing a character like Jack Sparrow or Willy Wonka, that requires nothing but a degree of responsibility to the intent of the story – responsibility to the filmmaker to deliver the goods”. I recognised that this (auditioning) process really had far less to do with performance and far less to do with connecting.