Depp, Jolie bonded during movie - Chicago Sun-Times

By CINDY PEARLMAN Dec 12, 2010 02:33AM

Angelina Jolie plays a mystery woman on the run and Johnny Depp is a widower who gets caught up in her intrigue in “The Tourist.”

PARIS — Here’s Johnny in a white T-shirt and a worn pair of jeans. Silver skull rings cover each finger and black silk bracelets adorn his wrists. His professionally mussed/non-washed hair falls into his face and stops abruptly at his chin, which is covered in two-day stubble. He wears nerdy, black, thick-rimmed glasses and has a denim bandana around his neck.

This is what’s known in fashion circles as Post-Pirate Couture.

Depp is fresh off playing Captain Jack Sparrow for the fourth time in a “Pirates of the Caribbean” sequel due out next year.

“I’m done and now I’m spending six days decompressing,” he says. “I’m in Paris. I’m eating bad foods, playing with my kids and watching cartoons. I’m a happy guy.”

Part of that decompressing is hanging out with a fellow A-Lister he barely knew before they made a movie together called “The Tourist”: Angelina Jolie.

“It was sort of surprising that after all of these years in this racket that we didn’t know each other,” Depp says. “We had a lot of mutual acquaintances, but I had never really met Angie before this movie.”

He gives Hollywood’s most famous lips the best lip service.

“I was immediately impressed by her,” he says. “It’s not that I had read so much in the press about her — or even myself. I did know that she and Brad [Pitt] are globally hounded, stalked and tracked down.

“Given that, I was most impressed by her kind of normalcy,” Depp says. “She’s very down to earth. She’s very smart, very funny, kind and caring. I was also impressed to find out that she’s a great mom. That’s always nice to see.”

Jolie returns the praise.

“Brad knew him first and said he was a great guy,” Jolie says. “I found that he was such a likable person. He’s very easy to talk to and I knew we would have fun together. We seemed to have a laugh very quicky.

“When we improvised most of what we did wasn’t usable. But it was funny to us.”

Depp, who lives with longtime girlfriend Vanessa Paradis and their two children in both Paris and Los Angeles, could relate to the Pitt-Jolie type of spotlight.

“Angie and I talked about how to live a normal life. The key is none of us really go out that much. Vanessa and I stay home a lot. We try to lead as normal a life as possible. A simple life.”

In “The Tourist,” Depp plays a widower from Wisconsin, a math teacher on vacation, who gets mixed up with a gorgeous mystery woman (Jolie) who is on the run from the law and Russian mobsters.

“The ultimate challenge is to portray an everyday man with all his warts,” Depp says. “Like any pedestrian, he’s put in a series of situations so radically outside his hemisphere.

“I like the idea of exploring normalcy,” Depp continues. “Those people who are considered normal most of the time are the most fascinating. They usually have routines teetering on obsessive and compulsive. I love their tics.”

The only issue Depp had with the movie was dancing.

“Dancing is the thing that scares me the most in life. Dancing to me is like a hard stunt,” says the man who didn’t mind jumping off rooftops and being dragged through the canals of Venice in the murky water. “I never dance in my life outside of my films. But weirdly it seems like in every film, I end up having to dance and go to jail.”

Good thing then that Depp refuses to watch his own films.

“I do my best to try and avoid them — at all costs,” he says. “My kids watch my movies. Obviously, there is a select few they can’t watch.”

Depp says the rock in his life is his family.

“Having kids didn’t change my life. It made my life,” he says. “Even when my kids were babies, I was the one learning from them. Now, my daughter Lily is 11 years old and my son Jack is 8. You start to get into these profound conversations. They ask me questions that leave my head spinning. They’ve added just pure joy to my life.”

Big Picture News Inc.

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