Few things have emphasized the fact that celebrities are people too quite so much as our current collective lockdown, which has been a firm reminder that, just because you’re famous, wealthy, and eternally catered to, that doesn’t mean you can’t go nuts from boredom, too. Much of that latent famous energy has, understandably, been pointed toward social media of late, where even stars who normally shy away from the online limelight have turned in order to get their FDA-recommended daily dose of adulation. Case in point: Scandal-beset actor Johnny Depp, who has an Instagram bunker now.
Depp posted what is apparently his very first social media video ever this week, operating in an aesthetic we might describe as “I saw Tim Burton do this once.” The actual content of Depp’s message is actually pretty straightforward—a toneless reminder that hey, we’re all in this together, even those of us who have squandered more money on wine than most people make in their lives and have undergone an extremely messy public divorce over the last few years. What’s much more disturbing is the reminder that everything going on in this video is legitimately what Johnny Depp, Hollywood Vampire, thinks is cool.
And really, not since Kevin Spacey dragged Frank Underwood’s corpse out of the woodshed for the internet to uncomfortably goggle at (twice!) has a celebrity steered harder, apparently unaware, into their own public relations creep factor. It’s the sort of thing you’d pitch as a joke, only to be told it’s too on the nose for fiction: Yes, obviously Johnny Depp has a creepy-ass cellar with a candelabra, a chess board, and an actual wine press in the background. Obviously, he films himself with the“Spooky Cinema” filter set to maximum. And of course, his entire monotone monologue about being nice to yourself is a very slow build to trying to get you to listen to his music, in this case a cover of John Lennon’s “Isolation” with Jeff Beck. Because if there’s one thing this quarantine has taught us, it’s that nothing soothes the soul like tone-deaf celebrities crooning out old Lennon tunes.
Anyway, this presumably won’t be the last we see of Johnny Depp’s Museum Of The Macabre, as the actor—while taking a brief moment to note the support he’s received from people over the last few years in a way that pointedly didn’t include words like “alleged domestic abuse”—mumbled out some promises that we might see him down in the ol’ bunker again real soon.