Call him eccentric, call him quirky - but whatever you do, don't call him cute. Johnny Depp has worked hard to avoid being just another pretty face.
"In Hollywood, generally, they're not comfortable if they can't label you," Depp said, his voice soft and low. "If they can't stamp you with a specific thing and call you something, they don't know what to do because there's so much money involved."I mean, merging money and creativity, it's like milk and orange juice. So they need to call you something, and I refuse to be called anything, other than a guy who acts."
But with his acclaimed performances as the title character in Tim Burton's "Edward Scissorhands" and as the unexpected suitor in "Benny & Joon," Depp realizes he is building a reputation as an actor with a taste for the offbeat - and that, he can live with.
"It certainly ain't the same as being called heartthrob, and it's not the same as being called teen idol," Depp said, his nose wrinkling in disgust. "If you're going to call me oddball and you're going to call me unusual - or a guy that does unusual stuff - at least that's closer to home."
Depp, who turned 30 in June, was seated in a Beverly Hills hotel suite, talking about his latest film, author Peter Hedges' adaptation of his novel "What's Eating Gilbert Grape." Directed by Lasse Hellstrom, it shows a different side of Depp in the title role of a contained young man coping with big-time family problems in small-town middle America.
Although the film is often quite funny, Gilbert takes his responsibilities seriously, and Depp says it's his most restrained performance to date.
"In a weird way, the character of Gilbert is like the eyes and ears of the audience," he added. "He's more reactive than anything else, and passive. And also, it was important for that character to not let too much out. It's all got to be going on, but you can't let it out at the back.
"One of the reasons why I wanted to do this film is because I was more interested in what was going on below the surface, much more than what was happening on the surface. I was interested in what was not being said, as opposed to what was being said. It is the straight role."
Depp drew his Gilbert largely from Hedges' book, but also from personal experience. Born in Kentucky, he grew up in Miramar, Fla., a town he says was not too different from "Grape's" fictional Endora. "Gilbert to me was a lot of guys I grew up with," he said.
Depp remembers being mostly bored in Miramar until, as an adolescent, he discovered the guitar.
"For all that confusing period of puberty, when you don't know what's going on, I locked myself in my room and just played the guitar. That's all I did after school every day - guitar, guitar. It was my obsession. So that really saved me a lot of confusion."
It was rock 'n' roll that brought him to Los Angeles as a member of a band called Kids. Once here, however, he fell into acting as a means of supporting his guitar-playing habit. After a couple of years - during which he appeared in "A Nightmare on Elm Street," "Slow Burn," "Private Resort" and the Oscar-winning "Platoon" - he figured it was time to start taking acting seriously.
"It wasn't, probably, until the beginning of '86 that I really thought, `I guess I'm no longer a musician, I think I must be an actor now, so I better learn about this.' And luckily, I developed the same obsession I'd developed earlier with the guitar. I just became obsessed and read a lot about it, studied here and there."
By the end of that year, Depp was starring in his own TV series - a memory that still makes him shudder.
"`21 Jump Street' - I can't believe I said that name! Woof. I just haven't said that name in a long time," Depp said.
"My experience was not a good one. I felt like I was just filling a space in between commercials and didn't feel good about it. And it had nothing to do with acting or work, it was just a product. And I was unhappy being packaged as a product, like a box of cereal, and forced down the throats of America as some sort of image that had nothing to do with me."
Ironically, "21 Jump Street" may have set the future course of Depp's career precisely because he so hated his boy-toy image in the Fox series about youthful-looking undercover cops who catch criminals by hanging out with wayward teenagers.
"I just swore to myself that I would only do the things that I wanted to do, I would only do things that I liked, at any risk, whether I disappeared - I just wanted to do good things, good stories, good directors and stuff."
Fortunately, Depp was able to convince a couple of maverick directors to take a chance on him - first John Waters, who cast him as the lead in the punk musical "Cry-Baby," and then Tim Burton.
"Tim really, really went out on a limb for me. To choose me as Edward Scissorhands was very unexpected. I think most of Hollywood did a double-take, because everyone believed that I was just another one of them guys," Depp said.
Lately, Depp has had to deal with a different sort of Hollywood smear campaign. The drug-overdose death of River Phoenix outside Depp's Viper Room rock club triggered an avalanche of media reports, some less than flattering about the club and its patrons.
"It's been targeted by these" - Depp paused, searching for the appropriate pejorative - "insects who are looking for ratings, and they're looking for magazine sales, and they're looking for newspaper sales.