If his recent career choices haven’t made it clear — “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films, “Alice in Wonderland” — Johnny Depp is looking to entertain the kids. And his latest — the animated “Rango,” about a chameleon who escapes his cage and fights crime in the Wild West — is no exception.
“I trust kids far more than I do adults,”?he says. “Kids give the honest opinion. They tell the truth.”
The revelation about younger audiences came, naturally, from his own experiences as a parent, Depp explains. “Before ‘Pirates 1,’ I had a daughter. And for about four years, all I watched was like cartoons — just cartoons,” he explains. “I realized at that point that the perimeters were far away from what we do in sort of normal, everyday movies, and that you can get away with a lot more.”
But while kids are a much more satisfying audience, Depp’s own children — daughter Lily-Rose, 11, and son Jack, 8 — can also be the toughest critics.
“The things that I’ve done that my kids have been sort of privy to — ‘Willy Wonka’ and all — it doesn’t register,” he says. “They’re far more interested in Justin Bieber.”
While Depp easily concedes that being an actor means telling lies for a living, telling lies as a parent hasn’t come nearly as naturally for him. “I had horrific guilt, playing along with the Santa Claus thing,” he says. “You’re never going to bring it up to them. They’re going to arrive and say, ‘Hey, you’ve been telling me a lie for my entire life. What are you prepared to do about that?’ We’re now kind of just on the outskirts of that, so I feel OK. But these are lies that society tells you [that] you must keep going, these kinds of myths. And I feel guilt about it. I still do.”
