When Johnny Depp first arrived in Los Angeles he had aspiration of becoming a rock star, however, fate had another plan for the soon-to-be teen heartthrob. His first big break was when he landed a major role in the 1984 horror-classic A Nightmare on Elm Street. It was directed by Wes Craven, who died last month from brain cancer. While promoting Black Mass at the Toronto International Film Festival, Depp paid tribute to the man the helped him become one of the most famous actors in Hollywood.
“Wes Craven was the guy who gave me my start, from my perspective, for almost no reason in particular,” Depp said during a Q&A session (via Variety). “I read scenes with his daughter when I auditioned for the part. At the time, I was a musician. I wasn’t really acting. It was not anything very near to my brain or my heart, which is pretty much how it remains to this day.”
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“But Wes Craven was brave enough to give me the gig based on his daughter’s opinion,” Depp continued. “I guess she had read with a bunch of actors, and after the casting sessions, she said, ‘No, that’s the guy.’ I always think of her for putting me in this mess, and certainly Wes Craven for being very brave to give me this gig. But he was a good man — so rest in peace, old Wes.”
Can your nightmares be fatal? In this classic of the horror film genre that launched a movie franchise, a hideously scarred pedophile who was murdered by a lynch mob returns years later in the terrifying nightmares of his killers’ teenage children — and the dreaming teenagers are starting to die in their sleep. Starring Academy Award-nominee and Golden Globe-winner Johnny Depp (“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” “Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy”), Golden Globe-winner John Saxon (“Enter the Dragon,” “The Appaloosa”), Heather Langenkamp (TV’s “Just the Ten of Us”) and Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger (“Urban Legend,” “The Mangler”).
