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Johnny Depp Admits He Gets Lines Fed to Him on Set, Believes LSD Would’ve Helped Find Osama bin Laden Faster

Johnny Depp's "Rolling Stone" profile is a bizarre and insane look at the actor's current state of mind. Here are the highlights.
Johnny Depp'Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales' premiere, Tokyo, Japan - 20 Jun 2017
Johnny Depp
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Johnny Depp tells all about his financial woes and legal battle against his former business managers in a lengthy interview with Rolling Stone, but the most shocking part of his sit-down with reporter Stephen Rodrick finds the actor sharing a polarizing theory: Dropping LSD out of airplanes over Pakistan would have helped find Osama bin Laden faster. Rodrick writes Depp is “evangelical in the uses of narcotics and thinks they could have expedited the capture of Osama bin Laden.”

“You get a bunch of fucking planes, big fucking planes that spray shit, and you drop LSD 25,” Depp said. “You saturate the fucking place. Every single thing will walk out of their cave smiling, happy.”

Depp’s bin Laden comment isn’t the only moment the actor reminisces about drugs. Depp remembered a time when Hunter S. Thompson picked up him at an airpot in Aspen, Colorado and told him there was something he wanted him to try. As Rodrick explains, “Thompson had a pipe filled with a sticky resin waiting for him. Depp did a hit, and the room spun.”

“[Thompson] was like, ‘Damn, some kids brought that over, and I took a hit and puked my guts out,’ ” Depp said. Thompson never told Depp what substance he snorted.

The actor also shared that Quaaludes were a favorite of the duo back in the day. Depp looked back fondly on the drug and lamented the fact Quaaludes are no longer a part of the drug scene. He shared with Rodrick a time in Florida where he was so high on Quaaludes he asked a club bouncer to punch him in the face.

“They’re made with just a little bit of arsenic, or strychnine,” Depp said of the drug. “So the high was far more immediate. You either wanted to smile and just be happy with your pals, or fuck, or fight.”

Not much of the Rolling Stone interview is dedicated to Depp’s film roles, although the actor looked back on battling with “Pirates of the Caribbean” screenwriters over the direction of Captain Jack Sparrow (“Why must you have these fucking heinous subplots? It’s convoluted. There is not a fucking soul that wants to see Captain Jack Sparrow sad”) and remembered being yelled at by one of his advisers for taking the role in “Ed Wood.”

“The guy told me, ‘Johnny, it is not about you doing black-and-white movies about a cross-dressing, D-movie director – it’s about fucking the girl and carrying the gun,’ ” Depp said. “ ‘You need to fuck the girl, and you need to carry a gun.’ ”

As for the rumor Depp uses an earpiece on set to have lines fed to him, Rodrick writes, “According to the lawsuit, Depp kept a sound engineer on the payroll so he could feed him lines through an earpiece while filming. This Depp does not deny.” However, Depp said he uses an earpiece not because he can’t remember his lines but because it allows his sound engineer to filter the lines and the sounds on set through the device so he can act better with his eyes.

“I’ve got bagpipes, a baby crying and bombs going off,” Depp said. “It creates a truth. Some of my biggest heroes were in silent film. It had to be behind the eyes. And my feeling is, that if there’s no truth behind the eyes, doesn’t matter what the fucking words are.”

Depp starred in last fall’s “Murder on the Orient Express” and will play the eponymous villain Grindelwald in “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald,” in theaters November 16. Head over to Rolling Stone to read Depp’s interview in its entirety.

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