The Multiple Personalities of Johnny Depp: The Smearing of Makeup and a Beloved Actor’s Career 

“People say I make strange choices, but they’re not strange for me. My sickness is that I’m fascinated by human behavior, by what’s underneath the surface, by the worlds inside people.” – John Christopher Depp II

Where and when did Johnny Depp say that? No idea. The above utterance is the kind of thing you find passed around Pinterest or the infinite number of inspirational quotation websites online, irrevocably tethered to the name succeeding it. At this point, “the worlds inside people” almost seems self-referential. After a string of flops, blowing his fortune, an extremely public divorce riddled with claims of abuse, we ponder Depp’s world. The one inhabited by personalities like Edward Scissorhands, Raoul Duke, Jack Sparrow, Willy Wonka, Sweeney Todd, James “Whitey” Bulger, and Gellert Grindelwald—the latter of which left the building after a British judge called the allegations that Depp’s a wife-beater “substantially true.”

Depp was once the sensitive bad boy who could’ve been a leading man but instead chose to become a quirky character actor, completely in control of his creative decisions. Now, it’s as if those multiple personalities forgot their conception, resulting in parodies of themselves (or just one gimmick?). We look at the history of Depp’s career—comprised of indie cult classics, pirates treasure, and failed reboots, smeared on the makeup of a thousand personalities.

Photo: Twentieth Century Fox/Universal Pictures/Walt Disney Pictures/Paramount Pictures/Warner Bros.

Diminishing returns: Johnny Depp Fans to Boycott ‘Fantastic Beasts 3,’ Joins the Rest of Us Who Just Wish They’d Stop Making Them

What not to do: The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard Dating Guide to Ending Your Relationship Amicably

Visit the Mandatory Shop for great deals on your very own Mandatory merch.

Follow Mandatory on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.


X