I have to say I admire the fantastic job Johnny does of staying out of negative press, but the idea of making movies that are so heavily merchandised pretty much negates the chances of him avoiding the “product” fate. Johnny, you are an icon and it seems you don’t even know it!

~WC~

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — To Johnny Depp, freedom means simplicity and anonymity.

Johnny Depp’s new film is “Sweeney Todd,” which opens Christmas Day.

“I’m sure it will be a possibility someday again. Maybe when I get old. They get tired of you,” the actor tells Esquire magazine in its January issue, available Friday. ” ‘Didn’t you used to be Johnny Depp?’ That will be the clincher.”

The 44-year-old star of “Sweeney Todd,” which opens Christmas Day, talked with the magazine about the lessons he’s learned over his two decades in Hollywood.

His friend and mentor Marlon Brando taught Depp to keep his private life private. “That’s your world and it’s nobody else’s business,” he recalls Brando saying. “It’s not anybody’s entertainment.”

A self-described people-watcher, Depp says he’s learned to enter restaurants through the kitchen and hotels through the parking garage. “It’ll definitely make you a little weird if you’re constantly being stared at,” he says. While he loves his work, Depp says he’s “not a great fan of all the stuff that goes along with it.”

“I don’t want to be a product,” he says. “Of course you want the movies to do well. But I don’t want to know…  who’s hot now and who’s not and who’s making this much dough and who’s boffing this woman or that one. I want to remain ignorant of all this. I want to be totally outside and far away from all of it.”