Photograph by Annie Leibovitz. Styled by Jessica Diehl.

“Meeting her and getting to know her was a real pleasant surprise,” Johnny Depp tells rock legend Patti Smith, writing for Vanity Fair, of working with Angelina Jolie on their upcoming film, The Tourist. “You don’t know what she might be like—if she has any sense of humor at all. I was so pleased to find that she is incredibly normal, and has a wonderfully kind of dark, perverse sense of humor.”

Depp tells Smith of the challenges he and his co-star faced with constant media scrutiny on set. “Poor thing, dogged by paparazzi, her and her husband, Brad all their kids,” Depp says of Angelina and her famous brood. “There are times when you see how ridiculous is this life, how ludicrous it is, you know, leaving your house every morning and being followed by paparazzi.”

Depp tells Smith about the difficulties that arose while filming together—having to be discreet to avoid unwarranted speculation—which included “having to hide, sometimes not even being able to talk to each other in public because someone will take a photograph and it will be misconstrued and turned into some other shit.”

Depp compares Angelina to another famous leading lady. “I’ve had the honor and the pleasure and gift of having known Elizabeth Taylor for a number of years,” he says. “You know, you sit down with her, she slings hash, she sits there and cusses like a sailor, and she’s hilarious. Angie’s got the same kind of thing, you know, the same approach.”

On the set of the upcoming installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, Smith asks Depp what it’s like to play the iconic role of Captain Jack Sparrow. “Somebody once asked [Hunter S. Thompson], “What is the sound of one hand clapping, Hunter?,” and he smacked him. Captain Jack was kind of like that for me, an opening up of this part of yourself,” Depp says. “There is a little Bugs Bunny in all of us.”

“They couldn’t stand him. They just couldn’t stand him,” Depp says of Disney’s reaction to his controversial interpretation of Sparrow. “I think it was Michael Eisner, the head of Disney at the time, who was quoted as saying, ‘He’s ruining the movie.’ Depp reveals to Smith, however, that he remained unfazed by the studio’s hysteria. “Upper-echelon Disney-ites, going, What’s wrong with him? Is he, you know, like some kind of weird simpleton? Is he drunk? By the way, is he gay? And so I actually told this woman who was the Disney-ite ‘But didn’t you know that all my characters are gay?’ Which really made her nervous.”

Depp tells Smith why his role of a mathematician in The Tourist appealed to him: “I was always fascinated by people who are considered completely normal, because I find them the weirdest of all.” Of the complications of having played so many eccentric roles in his career, he says, “They’re all still there, which on some level can’t be the healthiest thing in the world . I always picture it as this chest of drawers in your body—Ed Wood is in one, the Hatter is in another, Scissorhands is in another . They’re still very close to the surface.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Depp talks to Smith about their shared fondness for the Monkees’ 60s pop hit “Daydream Believer”; the music career he almost had (“Going into acting was an odd deviation from a particular road that I was on in my late teens, early 20s, because I had no desire, no interest, really, in it at all. I was a musician and I was a guitarist, and that’s what I wanted to do”); being born in the wrong time (“I really believe that, at a certain point, if you’re born in ’60-something or whatever, you got ripped off—you know what I mean? I always felt like I was meant to have been born in another era, another time”); and what he’d still like to accomplish: “[Marlon Brando said,] Why don’t you just take a year and go and study Shakespeare, or go and study Hamlet. Go and work on Hamlet and play that part. Play that part before you’re too old . So what he was trying to tell me was: play that fucking part, man. Play that part before you’re too long in the tooth. Play it. And I would like to. I’d really, really like to.”

READ MORE:

• The Definitive Depp: A V.F. slide show retrospective