“So is this is what it’s like to be Johnny Depp: unable to venture out in public without instantly drawing a near-fanatical crowd?” wonders reporter John Hiscock in a revealing article in the UK’s Daily Telegraph. He describes Johnny’s entrance at the Chicago after-party for Public Enemies, a by-invitation-only gathering of Chicago’s elite, where Johnny was mobbed: “By the time he reaches the bottom step the crowd has swelled to a heaving mass, everyone trying to get near him, touch him, take his picture and plead for autographs.”

“It was really weird, wasn’t it?” Johnny agreed, in a conversation with Hiscock on the day after the party. “Oh man, you don’t ever get used to that kind of thing. You just don’t. That’s why I hardly ever leave my house. I don’t go anywhere. I understand what it’s about and I appreciate it on a very profound level but there’s only so much of that sort of thing a human being can deal with.” Added Johnny, “If the choice is between being constantly gawked at and sitting in a chair in a dark room, I prefer the dark room.”

His tropical island offers a welcome respite from being on constant display. Johnny told Hiscock that he discovered his island in the Exumas by serendipity: “Like everything else in my life, it wasn’t planned, it just kind of happened,” Johnny explained. “After I had done the first Pirates movie and Secret Window, I went on vacation to escape with my kiddies and my girl and someone said that there was an island down the road for sale. I said,’Oh well, let’s go see it.’ I looked at it, I walked on it and I was done.

“It had to be. So I immediately called my business manager and said ‘Please,’ and that was it,” Johnny told Hiscock. “It came at the perfect moment for me. The island can be perceived as a luxury and it certainly is, but it provides me with simplicity and somewhere I can go where no one is looking at me or pointing a camera or a finger at me. I can just be.”

The Zone thanks Emma for sharing the Daily Telegraph article; you can read more on the News & Views forum or CLICK HERE. It’s a fine interview that deserves to be read in its entirety.

To see a larger version of the photo of JD signing autographs at the Los Angeles Public Enemies premiere, CLICK HERE, and to see him signing for the crowd outside the David Letterman show in New York, CLICK HERE. –Part-Time Poet