johnny depp (27 posts)

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Johnny Depp is going Gollum.

The Hollywood hunk is reteaming with Pirates of the Caribbean helmer Gore Verbinski for Rango, a feature-length CGI 'toon about household pets. Depp will voice the lead critter, who goes an adventure of self-discovery, Paramount Pictures confirms.

Jeez, our cat just spends the day licking himself.

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Sipa via AP Images

Here's some news Will Smith can take to the bank, along with those eight-figure paychecks: The Hancock star is the top-paid actor in Hollywood, according to the latest figures from the number crunchers over at Forbes.com.

Based on salaries earned between June 1, 2007, through June 1, 2008, Smith bested all competitors, male or female, raking in an estimated $80 million for his big-screen efforts.

His nearest moneymaking rival is Johnny Depp, whose pirate's booty totaled $72 million.

Not bad for a year's work.

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Miu Miu

Maybe we’re just jealous that Vanessa Paradis gets to warm her toes at night between Johnny Depp’s feet, but we can’t help but think that in this new Miu Miu ad the model-singer bears a striking resemblance to Madeline Kahn in Young Frankenstein.

Johnny, if that's what you're into, we can pose like robots with our heads tossed back, too! True, we look more like Gene Wilder than Ms. Kahn, but call us!

—Via FadedYouthBlog

The CW

OMFG. Consider the Gossip Girl word sufficiently spread.

The CW hit received a leading—and whopping—14 nominations this morning for the Teen Choice 2008 Awards.

Chris Brown checked in with nine nods, Miley Cyrus (who will host the ceremony) scored four nods, and perpetual nominee Justin Timberlake racked up three.

Timberlake is the awards' winningest artist, having aggregated 21 surfboards—the event's laid-back hardware of choice—since 1999.

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What do Johnny Depp, President Jimmy Carter and Pat Buchanan have in common? They all have big things to say about the late journalist-genius-gun nut Hunter S. Thompson in this new trailer from the documentary Gonzo, that's what.

Depp was buddy-buddy with Thompson, and played him to shiny-domed perfection in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, so it's no surprise he's the first face we see here. But what do you think: Can director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) help the '70s icon make yet another comeback, or is this one Depp flick you'll skip?

Hollywood's version of the three musketeers is riding to the rescue of fallen pal Heath Ledger's final film.

Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law are literally embracing the all-for-one ethos, tag-teaming as Heath Ledger's character in the unfinished The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

The BBC quoted a spokesperson for Law confirming the actors' participation, "subject to negotiations."

No further details were immediately available. There was no further comment Monday from the actors or filmmakers.

The fate of the Terry Gilliam-helmed fantasy film had been in peril since Ledger's shocking death Jan. 22 due to an accidental drug overdose.

Because the film focuses on a magical acting troupe and alternate dimensions, it is believed Depp, Farrell and Law will each play a different incarnation of Ledger's character, known only as "Tony."

According to Variety, Ledger's name helped the independent production secure its $30 million budget. Without its biggest star, the movie has three options, the paper said: recast, shoot around Ledger's absence or call "cut."

Filming on Doctor Parnassus began in December. The 28-year-old Ledger, who died in New York, had been shooting in London the week before his death.

Following Ledger's demise, Gilliam and the producers said they "will be assessing how best to proceed."

Heath was a great actor, a great friend and a great spirit," the statement said. "We are still in a state of deep shock, saddened and numb with grief."

Depp, for one, probably felt an obligation to help out Gilliam.

The actor had been one of the stars of the director's ambitious The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which was scrapped midway through production in 2000 after the elderly actor playing the title role suffered a back injury and was unable to continue.

Ledger did complete work on The Dark Knight before he died. The Batman Begins sequel, featuring Ledger as the Joker, is due out July 18.

Johnny Depp is giving back in a big way.

A day after winning a Golden Globe, the Pirates of the Caribbean star on Monday gave a bundle of his own doubloons, $2 million worth, to London's Great Ormond Street Hospital as thanks to the staff who saved his daughter's life.

Per Britain's Daily Mail, the 43-year-old Depp also made a surprise visit to the facility to personally thank the doctors and nurses.

The star's eight-year-old daughter, Lily-Rose, was hospitalized in March after an E. coli poisoning reportedly caused her kidneys to fail.

Depp and his longtime companion and Lily-Rose's mom, Vanessa Paradis, put their lives on hold (including filming of Sweeney Todd) for a bedside vigil. Fortunately, after intensive treatment, the child's health gradually improved, and she was able to go home nine days later.

Depp and Paradis also have a six-year-old son, Jack.

As an extra thank-you, Depp reportedly invited Lily-Rose's five doctors and nurses to last month's London premiere party for Sweeney.

And in a gesture that undoubtedly put a smile on every sick kids' face, Depp also secretly turned up at Great Ormond Nov. 29 and entertained its young patients with bedtime stories in the guise of Captain Jack Sparrow. (He even had his costume flown in from Los Angeles for the occasion.)

Lily-Rose apparently caught a virulent strain of the bacterium at a rented mansion in Richmond, Surrey, where the family was holed up while he was filming the big-screen adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical at nearby Pinewood Studios.

Burton halted production on Sweeney until Depp could return.

Depp told Entertainment Weekly in a recent interview that the experience was the most terrifying moment of his life.

"To say it was the darkest moment, that's nothing," he said. "It doesn't come close to describing it. Words are so small."

He also added that he wasn't sure whether he'd be able to make it back to the Sweeney set and suggested Burton consider recasting the role.

As it turned out, Depp did resume work on the movie, which on Sunday earned him his first Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy.

Better keep a pen handy, just in case you run into Johnny Depp. And if you run into Will Ferrell…just cap your pen and walk on? 

For the third straight year, Depp has been called the most gracious celeb around when it comes to providing fans with his John Hancock, according to Autograph Magazine's annual list of the 10 Best and Worst Hollywood Signers. 

And in what seems like a surprising revelation, Ferrell has been deemed the worst star with regard to giving autographs, with Autograph reporting in its December issue that the Blades of Glory star has been spotted taking a cue from his two-year-old YouTube costar and taunting people who approach him for signatures.  

Ferrell is joined in the doghouse by Tobey Maguire, Joaquin Phoenix, William Shatner, Renée Zellweger, John Malkovich, Julie Andrews, Bruce Willis, Teri Hatcher and Scarlett Johansson.  

But before you grab a felt-tip marker and ask Depp to sign your breasts and pose for pictures with your puppy, Autograph has included this disclaimer: 

"Keep in mind that even the best signers don't sign sometimes, the worst sometimes do, and that just because they're on the worst list doesn't mean they're bad people," the magazine notes. 

Depp, a People's Choice Award winner for Favorite Male Movie Star two years in a row, is none the worse for wear by being named number one, though. 

Autograph calls the Sweeney Todd star ”Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on film and 'Johnny and the Signing Factory' in person." 

"Though soft-spoken and laid-back, he likes to talk to fans and get to know them while signing," New York autograph dealer Anthony Risi told the mag, which says editors compiled their signature stats from judges based in Europe, New York and California who spent the past year observing how A-listers treat their fans. 

Depp's similarly approachable colleagues, according to Autograph, include Matt Damon, George Clooney, Jack Nicholson, Rosario Dawson, John Travolta, Katherine Heigl, Jay Leno, Dakota Fanning (nice to know she hasn't acquired a major 'tude yet!) and, in a complete about-face, Russell Crowe, who ranked among the worst signers last year. 

Apparently, he has since "started treating fans great, signing, taking pictures and chatting them up." 

So, if you think the timing's right, go ahead and say "g'day" to Russell.

Johnny Depp is going gangster again.

After two scheduled projects stalled due to the ongoing writers' strike, the Donnie Brasco alum has been spared the unemployment line thanks to Michael Mann. The Oscar-nominated filmmker has recruited Depp to play one of the baddies in Public Enemies, a Universal drama about Depression-era America's most notorious criminals and the legendary lawmen who hunted them down.

According to Variety, the 44-year-old Depp and the Miami Vice director met and sealed the deal just hours before the actor's latest big-screen vehicle, Tim Burton's adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, had its Hollywood premiere Wednesday.

In Enemies, Depp will play notorious bank heister John Dillinger, whose headline-grabbing exploits made him public enemy number one in the eyes of authorities and a Robin Hood-like figure among the people.

He and his infamous fellow ne'er-do-wells, a rogue's gallery that included Baby Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, Ma Barker and Bonnie and Clyde, were part of the great crime wave of the early '30s. To combat the violent period in U.S. history, the government empowered the FBI, under the stewardship of J. Edgar Hoover, to become a national police force.

Hoover vowed to hunt down his so-called "public enemies" with much success. Dillinger, for instance, died after being gunned down by the feds outside the Biograph Theater in Chicago's uptown neighborhood of Lincoln Park, where he was coincidentally catching a screening of a gangster movie.

Mann adapted the screenplay to Public Enemies from Bryan Burrough's 2004 nonfiction book of the same name. The filmmaker and his Forward Pass shingle will coproduce the flick with Kevin Misher and his Misher Films. Tribeca Productions' Jane Rosenthal will exec produce.

After wrapping Sweeney Todd, Depp was expected to segue into Shantaram for director Mira Nair, followed by The Rum Diary, an adaptation of his late friend Hunter S. Thompson's debut novel.

But the WGA strike put the kibosh on those plans last month.

Warner Bros. decided to delay shooting on Shantaram to allow more time for rewrites and a reworking of the budget.

Likewise, The Rum Diary was put on ice temporarily while the script awaits tweaking.

And that left the usually busy Depp with lots of free time—and that's when Mann made his move.

The helmer, whose credits include The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider, Heat, Ali and last year's feature film version of his hit TV series Miami Vice, had considered reuniting with his Collateral star Tom Cruise for the spy thriller Edwin Salt. But when Depp became available, he and Universal decided to put that on the back burner and fast-track Enemies instead.

Cameras roll on Public Enemies in Chicago in March.

Johnny Depp's winter vacation has arrived early this year.

Another handful of big-screen productions have been put on hold thanks to the ongoing writers strike, including two of the Oscar-nominated actor's upcoming films, Shantaram and The Rum Diary.

Warner Bros' Shantaram, originally scheduled to begin shooting this winter in India and Afghanistan, was to star Depp as an Australian heroin addict who escapes from prison, reinvents himself as a doctor who ministers to the poor in India, and is later able to put his criminal connections to good use in the fight against Russian troops in Afghanistan.

The studio has said that, while the start of monsoon season in India and a skyrocketing budget also helped slow the project down, the script adapted from Gregory David Roberts' novel just isn't ready yet.

Forrest Gump and Munich scribe Eric Roth had been working on the latest rewrite in an attempt to slash production costs, per Variety, but the Writers Guild of America member is prohibited from attending to Shantaram while the union is striking.

A similar fate befell Oliver Stone's Pinkville and Ron Howard's Angels & Demons last week. The Da Vinci Code screenwriter Akiva Goldsman reportedly worked round the clock to finish Angels & Demons in the days leading up to the expiration of the WGA contract, but Columbia Pictures announced that the script is still in need of fine-tuning.

Meanwhile, WB says that it's still planning to make Shantaram, which Mira Nair is attached to direct, as soon as possible.

Also on hold is the film Depp was planning to make after Shantaram, Warner Independent Pictures' adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's The Rum Diary, loosely based on the gonzo journalist's experiences reporting from Puerto Rico in the 1950s.

Depp, who played the late gonzo journalist in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, will in The Rum Diary chronicle his surroundings as the Thompson-inspired character Paul Kemp.

The project is still in the developmental stage, where it will apparently remain for some time.

(But luckily it will seem as if Depp never went away—Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, starring the actor as the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, opens Dec. 21.)

Over at the Weinstein Co., Chicago Oscar-winner Rob Marshall's next Broadway-to-big-screen conversion—Nine, starring Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Sophia Loren and Marion Cotillard—has been shut down for now, but cameras are slated to start rolling in the second half of 2008.

Citing the need for complete compatibility between the script, originally penned by Michael Tolkin and in the middle of a rewrite from Anthony Minghella, and the director's choreography, the studio has opted to wait until the writers are available to proceed with production.

In other strike-related news, the pickets may soon be adding to their ranks.

CBS News radio and TV writers, graphic artists, editors and other behind-the-scenes talent voted last week to authorize a strike, meaning WGA leaders could call for a walkout at any time.

Network and union reps have been meeting since January to hammer out a new contract, with the writers objecting to provisions that would allow CBS to hire non-union scribes for certain tasks and mandate lower salary increases for local radio scribes than for TV and network radio writers.

"It’s a very powerful vote," WGA East president Michael Winship said. "It proves that the CBS News folks have reached a point where they have taken this situation in their own hands and recognized that they need to get a contract, whatever needs to be done."

CBS, however, maintains that it brought a "fair and reasonable" offer to the table and, while the company hopes there is no strike, the network will have it covered.

"CBS News, CBS Television Stations and CBS Radio remains fully prepared, and ready to continue producing the highest quality news programming for our viewers," Katie Couric's employer said in a statement.

More than 500 writers, graphic artists, assistants, promotion writers and researchers in Los Angeles, New York, Washington D.C. and Chicago, about 40 percent of whom work on network shows, would be affected by a walkout.

CBS News scribes are still hard at work, however, while their drama and comedy-writing counterparts in L.A. and NYC have been pounding the pavement in front of studios and network offices since Nov. 5.

It turns out that the casts of Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock's idea to perform live episodes at a Manhattan theater on Saturday and Monday, with all proceeds going to each show's production staff, was prompted by necessity.

NBC gave more than 50 SNL employees the boot on Friday, despite its decision to keep nonwriting staff members from The Tonight Show and Late Night with Conan O'Brien on the payroll until at least the end of next week. The cast of the late-night sketch show hasn't been in production since Nov. 3, has been placed on unpaid hiatus—a move that has SAG and the American Federation of TV and Radio Artists shaking their collective heads.  

More than 4,000 strikers and supporters—actors, directors, production staff, musicians, members of the California nurses and farm workers unions, etc.—showed up Tuesday for a WGA-organized solidarity rally, the last big sanctioned event until Nov. 26, when union negotiators are scheduled to resume contract talks with the Alliance of Motion Picture & TV Producers.

Alicia Keys, who told the crowd that, as a writer herself, she is fully behind the cause, performed "No One" and "Go Ahead."

"I’m a writer. Without words, there are no songs. Without words, there are no stories," she said. "Stay strong, I'm supporting you! Let's walk!"

And then the throng marched down Hollywood Boulevard.

Goldsman, whose schedule cleared right up once he had to stop fiddling with Angels & Demons, said that there isn't much that could pull him away from his life's work.

"But on Nov. 5, I stopped writing," the Oscar winner said. "And I won't pick up my pen again until we have a fair deal."

Johnny Depp still isn't giving details of the mystery illness that sent his daughter to the hospital last March, but when it comes to his own emotions over the health scare, he's less tight-lipped.

"To say it was the darkest moment, that's nothing," the actor tells Entertainment Weekly. "It doesn't come close to describing it. Words are so small."

During the time Lily-Rose, then 7, was ill, Depp took a break from production on Sweeney Todd to be by his daughter's bedside until she recovered.

At the time, the film was about three weeks into shooting, and Depp was unsure whether he would be able to complete the role.

"I didn't know if I was coming back," he recalls. "I remember talking with [director Tim Burton], saying, 'Maybe you need to recast.' "

However, Burton and the rest of the crew stood by Depp and worked around his parental responsibilities.

"We've adjusted his schedule to fit in with his needs," DreamWorks said in a statement at the time. "Everybody's with them in good spirits."

Lily-Rose, now 8, has since made a full recovery and will suffer no lasting effects from the malaise, much to the relief of Depp and partner Vanessa Paradis.

"Now every single millisecond is a minicelebration, man," Depp says. "Every time we get to breathe in and exhale is a huge victory. She pulled through beautifully, perfectly, with no lasting anything."

Once the child was given a clean bill of health, Depp headed back to work on Sweeney Todd, the big-screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's Tony Award-winning musical about the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

The film, costarring Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen, marks Depp's sixth collaboration with Burton and is slated to open Dec. 21.

The stock market may be down, but Matt Damon is up.

The movie star, who just had the best opening weekend of his career with The Bourne Ultimatum, is tops when it comes to how much his films earn at the box office for every dollar he earns in salary, according to Forbes' inaugural Ultimate Star Payback list.

Besting fellow A-listers Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp and towering over the Toms (Hanks and Cruise), Damon's last three films, not including the new Bourne, have grossed $29 per buck he was paid for the roles.

Forbes calculated a film's net revenue by totaling its worldwide grosses and U.S. DVD sales and then subtracting the project's budget. The net revenue was then divided by an actor's total compensation to produce gross income. All actors were then ranked according to the average gross income of their last three films.

So, the smaller a film's budget and its star's paycheck was, combined with how popular the movie was in theaters, especially overseas, and with DVD audiences, the larger the "star payback."

Ocean's crew mate Pitt, buoyed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Troy's huge international showing, ranked a close second, with a gross income return of $24, and Vince Vaughn and Johnny Depp tied for third place with $21.

Vaughn's number was helped in part by the relatively low production costs that went into making the hit comedies Dodgeball, Wedding Crashers and The Break-Up. Depp, meanwhile, happened to star in one of the top-earning movies of all time, The Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.

Jennifer Aniston, largely thanks to The Break-Up (it sure wasn't thanks to Rumor Has It...), which raked in about $205 million worldwide, rounds out the top five with $17.

But, while these numbers certainly give producers something to think about, you can't measure fans' love and acting prowess in dollar signs.

"The biggest stars in Hollywood are not the actors that deliver the biggest returns," Forbes senior editor Michael Ozanian said in a statement.

Tom Hanks, for instance, isn't going to be collecting smaller paychecks anytime soon, despite the fact that his gross income of $12 is half that of Damon's. Fellow top earners Tom Cruise and Will Smith check in right behind him with $11 and $10, respectively. Leonardo Dicaprio and Denzel Washington are also $11 and $10 men, according to the list.

Meanwhile, Hollywood's leading ladies tended to fare better than their male counterparts, ratio-wise, with Angelina Jolie, Reese Witherspoon and Sandra Bullock hanging tough with $15, $14 and $13.

Affected by Forbes' use of worldwide box office as opposed to just U.S. ticket sales were comedy kings Adam Sandler ($9), Will Farrell ($8—the French just didn't love Talladega Nights) and, once upon a time, Jim Carrey ($8), whose last blockbuster hit was Bruce Almighty…five movies ago.

And despite his Oscar-winning pedigree, Russell Crowe's last three films—A Good Year, Cinderella Man and Master and Commander—didn't slay the box office competition, leaving the Aussie actor in last place with $5 in grosses for every dollar he was paid in salary.

For the full list, check out Forbes' complete report.