Johnny Depp: 5 Awesome Performances & 5 That Sucked

An enigma wrapped in a riddle covered in make-up and a hat.

By James Hunt /

Disney

Late last year and early in this one, there was something of a narrative created around Johnny Depp. His performance in Black Mass was gathering some awards buzz, and the idea of this being his 'comeback' was floating around faster than the Black Pearl.

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It never quite gained the momentum necessary, with Depp falling short of a fourth Oscar nomination, and while his performance was pretty good in it, the film was rather average. But the question of a Depp comeback became on interesting one.

He's unquestionably one of the biggest movie stars in the world, and has been for well over a decade now, and yet the trade-off seems to have been an increasingly poor choice of roles and over-reliance on weird make-up and silly hats.

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Depp truly announced himself to the world in Pirates of the Caribbean, but to film fans he'd spent the past decade cultivating a filmography that set him apart from his peers and belied his pretty-boy looks - he could walk the line between blockbuster star and indie darling with perfect balance and rock-star swagger.

It's not that he's become a bad actor (Black Mass shows that), but rather put more stock into the strange habits and appearances than he has in actually acting. As he gets set to reprise his role as the Mad Hatter in Alice Through The Looking Glass, it's time to look back on one of the most popular and, yes, talented movie stars of a generation; the films that made us fall for him, and the ones that mean he has something to come back from.

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