Drugs, alcohol and endless despair: Unveiling Johnny Depp’s dark past

Hollywood’s top star Johnny Depp may be regarded as one of the leading stars in the industry but the path to fame and glory was no bed of roses for him.

An old resurfaced interview with Vanity Fair shows the Pirates of the Caribbean star throwing light on his dark past and how he got involved with drugs and alcohol at a considerably young age.

“Oh, man, yeah. Johnny was unhappy then … It was a pretty dark time for me. I don’t know what was going on. Well, I was poisoning myself beyond belief. I’d eat that glass, man. There was a lot of liquor. A lot of liquor. I was pretty unhealthy,” he said during the 1997 interview.

Later in 2008, Depp revealed to The Boston Globe: “I never wanted to be the guy people looked at. I felt I could only be myself when I was alone, that I turned into some kind of novelty. The only way I could get through that time was to drink.”

“I spent years poisoning myself. I was very, very good at it. But finally I was faced with a critical decision: Do I want to continue to be a [expletive] or do I want to not be a [expletive]? It was best to stop. Now I look back and say, ‘Why? Why did I do that?’”

He went on to confess that his alcoholism was not ‘for fun’: “I never had that. It was never about recreation. Not. Ever. That was never my motivation.”

He had opened up about his addiction once more during an interview with Playboy in 2004: “I was never a cokehead or anything like that. I always despised that drug. I thought it was a waste of time, pointless. But I was poisoning myself with alcohol and medicating myself. I was trying not to feel things, and that’s ridiculous.”