Janelle Monáe: 'I would like to emulate Johnny Depp's career'

Edited By: Kshitij Mohan Rawat
New Delhi Updated: Oct 15, 2022, 10:39 AM(IST)

Janelle Monáe would like her career to go on a trajectory similar to Johnny Depp's. Photograph:( AFP )

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Janelle Monáe has revealed whose film career she would like to emulate. It's none other than Johnny Depp. She, however, made it clear she is referring to Depp the actor, not Depp the person. Monáe, known for films like 'Moonlight' and TV shows like 'Homecoming', said when she thinks about careers "this person as an actor, his life as an actor only, it’s Johnny Depp."

American actor and singer Janelle Monáe has revealed whose film career she would like to emulate. It's none other than Johnny Depp. She, however, made it clear she is referring to Depp the actor, not Depp the person. Monáe, known for films like 'Moonlight' and TV shows like 'Homecoming', said when she thinks about careers "this person as an actor, his life as an actor only, it’s Johnny Depp."

Monáe, who is a winner of the MTV Video Music Award, was speaking at a Q&A at the BFI London Film Festival held before the premiere of her upcoming movie, 'Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery' on Sunday.

Also Read: Johnny Depp shaves beard and moustache, looks unrecognisable in new photos. See pics here

“The amount of roles, from Willy Wonka, to Sweeney Todd, to all of the dramatic roles, [I want to do] whatever is the Janelle Monáe version of that, with those transformative characters that people are dressing up as on Halloween. I’m thinking that level. I’m ready to go there. Something grounded, but embedded in the hearts and minds of children," she added. 

Johnny Depp indeed has had a glorious film career. He first rose to fame with the iconic horror film 'A Nightmare on Elm Street' and the TV series '21 Jump Street' in the 1980s. In 1990, he began his long-standing collaboration with auteur Tim Burton with 'Edward Scissorhands'. They went on to work again in films like 'Sleep Hollow', 'Dark Shadows', 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory', 'Alice in Wonderland', and so on.

But Depp is most well-known for his drunken, deceitful rogue pirate Jack Sparrow in the six ' Pirates of the Caribbean films from 2003 to 2017.

It is notable that Monáe focussed on Depp the actor, to differentiate it from Depp the person. In the early 2010s, Depp was one of world's biggest film stars. But his reputation took a hit after his then-wife Amber Heard, with whom he was married from 2015 to 2017, alleged physical and mental abuse in 2016. In 2018, Depp sued The Sun's publishers News Corp, unsuccessfully as it turned out, for calling him a wife-beater. In the next year, he filed a defamation suit against Heard for an op-ed she had penned for the Washington Post titled "I spoke up against sexual violence — and faced our culture's wrath. That has to change". While she had not named him, Depp filed for defamation anyway. Depp emerged as the winner of the televised and highly-publicised trial, held at Fairfax, Virginia earlier this year

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