Johnny Depp swung back into his iconic Captain Jack Sparrow role yesterday at the Cannes premiere of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the fourth episode in the lucrative franchise.
Three years after At World’s End, Sparrow embarks on a quest to find the Fountain of Youth while also trying to square his feelings for a mysterious woman from his past, Penelope Cruz’s Angelica, essentially his female double.
Speaking to journalists after the screening, Depp thanked the cartoons he watched with his children for helping develop Sparrow’s character and echoed producer Jerry Bruckheimer in saying that the franchise had no end in sight.
“I have such great respect for the parameters of cartoons and the characters; they can get away with a lot more than we can in live action films,” Depp said.
“So I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to find that blend until you actually become Bugs Bunny in human form?’, and so I have my children to thank for that.”
“With Captain Jack I feel like there’s much more fun to be had,” Depp said. “As long as the stories, the scripts are great and you have directors like Rob Marshall we’ll be in good shape.”
Depp described Sparrow as “a weird combination of an 18th-century rock and roll star and a very romantic skunk.”
Spanish Oscar winner Cruz, who worked with Depp on Blow, said her English had progressed greatly since the 2001 cocaine smuggler biopic and that the toughest thing playing opposite Sparrow had been “keeping a straight face”.
The film is shot in 3D, the perfect format for the obligatory cutlass swinging and sword stabbing from which pirates make a living, and sees rival English, Spanish and pirate ships racing to track down the magical elixir.
Sparrow’s gold-toothed walking haberdashery is true to form, the corners of his mouth and eyes twitching as he plots a series of escapes from certain death and tries to learn Angelica’s neat trick of “lying by telling the truth”.
The story takes us from the muddy cobbled streets of 18th-century London – where Angelica is trying to raise a crew for a ship and Sparrow is facing execution – across the seas to lush Caribbean islands.