The last few years or so has seen a few high profile actors look toward the horizon, planning to put their feet up and walk away from movie sets. In the fall of 2011, Brad Pitt said that within three years he’d move away from acting to focus more on producing and development, while earlier this year Leonardo DiCaprio announced a “long, long break” from his day job to focus on environmental issues. Now, Johnny Depp is eyeballing a point in the not too distant future where he’ll hang up his Jack Sparrow feathers.
Earlier this year, as his 50th birthday rolled around, he told Rolling Stone that “I can’t say that I’d want to be doing this for another 10 years.” He elaborated that his life of being in the public eye was beginning to wear him down, though he wasn’t quite ready to pass up the creative opportunities in front of him. “I think while I’ve got the opportunity and the desire and the creative spark to do the things that I can do right now, I should do them,” he explained. “And then, at a certain point, just take it down to the bare minimum and concentrate on, I guess, living life. Really living life. And going somewhere where you don’t have to be on the run, or sneak in through the kitchen or the underground labyrinth of the hotel. At a certain point, when you get old enough or get a few brain cells back, you realize that, on some level, you lived a life of a fugitive.”
Talking more recently with BBC Breakfast, his thoughts of hanging it up are becoming a bit more vivid, and while he says he won’t be “dropping out any second” he adds that the day we don’t see him on screen is “probably not too far away.”
“At a certain point you start thinking and you know when you add up the amount of dialogue you say per year, for example, and you realise that you’ve said written words more than you’ve actually had a chance to say your own words, you start thinking about that as a kind of insane option for a human being,” he said. “So are there quieter things that I wouldn’t mind doing? Yeah, I would not mind that.”
But let’s not worry about this too intently just yet. The actor is busier than ever, having recently just wrapped Wally Pfister‘s “Transcendence,” and getting ready to shoot two movies before the end of the year: the crime comedy “Mortdecai” and the musical “Into The Woods.” Of course, there’s another “Pirates Of The Caribbean” outing slated, as well as a sequel to “Alice In Wonderland.”
So Depp will be with us a few more years yet, but it seems the sand is already running through the hourglass — is there anything you want to see him do before he rides into the sunset? [The Independent]