Johnny Depp: A Career Retrospective, 20 Essential Films

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Johnny Depp's career has moved through more phases than most actors get in a lifetime: teen horror scream, indie oddball, arthouse leading man, blockbuster franchise anchor, and character actor chasing real historical figures. Across four decades, a handful of collaborators, especially Tim Burton, have shaped the throughline of his work, but the films below trace the whole arc, from his first credited role to his most recent return to the screen.

Release Dates

All 20 films covered in this guide, in the order they were released.

A Nightmare on Elm Street

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1984 · Directed by Wes Craven

Depp's first credited film role came almost by accident. He attended an audition with a friend and ended up landing the part of Glen Lantz, the boyfriend of Nancy Thompson in Wes Craven's original slasher classic, despite having no formal acting training and no real plans for a film career at the time.

Glen isn't a large role, but the film gave Depp one of horror's most infamous death scenes, in which his character is pulled into his bed and geysered back out in a wave of blood. The special effects work became one of the most referenced moments of 1980s horror cinema.

The film's unexpected success redirected Depp's path entirely. Rather than returning to music, which he'd been pursuing before the audition, he found himself fielding more acting offers, eventually landing the lead in the TV series 21 Jump Street a few years later.

Edward Scissorhands

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1990 · Directed by Tim Burton

Edward Scissorhands marked the start of what would become the most important creative partnership of Depp's career. Tim Burton cast him as Edward, an artificial man left unfinished by his inventor, with blades for hands, living in isolation until a suburban family takes him in.

The role required Depp to communicate almost entirely through physicality and restraint, since Edward speaks sparingly and can't touch anything without risking harm. Depp has said the part let him explore a kind of open vulnerability he hadn't accessed before, and it remains one of his most personally significant roles.

The film was a commercial and critical success and effectively rebranded Depp from teen idol to serious character actor. It also set the tone for the strange, melancholic outsiders he and Burton would keep returning to across nearly a dozen further collaborations.

I'm not finished.— Edward, Edward Scissorhands

Benny & Joon

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1993 · Directed by Jeremiah S. Chechik

Benny & Joon cast Depp as Sam, an odd, silent-film-obsessed drifter who moves in with a mentally ill young woman named Joon and her overprotective brother Benny. The role leaned heavily into physical comedy, drawing direct inspiration from silent film stars like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

Depp performed many of his own stunts and sight gags, including a memorable dinner-roll dance sequence lifted almost directly from Chaplin's The Gold Rush, done as a deliberate homage rather than a copy.

The film became a modest hit and reinforced Depp's growing reputation for picking small, offbeat projects over more conventional leading-man roles that were being offered to him following his 21 Jump Street fame.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape

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1993 · Directed by Lasse Hallstrom

Depp plays Gilbert, a young man caring for his intellectually disabled younger brother Arnie and his severely overweight, housebound mother in a small Iowa town, in a role that required him to underplay nearly everything for the film's more explosive performances to land around him.

The film paired Depp with a young Leonardo DiCaprio, whose performance as Arnie earned an Oscar nomination and a wave of early acclaim. Depp's own performance, quieter and more internal, drew praise for holding the emotional center of the film without competing for its spotlight.

Critically, the film is often cited as an early turning point that proved Depp could anchor a serious dramatic ensemble, not just carry quirky character pieces, setting up the more prestige-oriented work that would follow later in the decade.

Ed Wood

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1994 · Directed by Tim Burton

Depp's second collaboration with Tim Burton cast him as Ed Wood, the real filmmaker widely remembered as the director behind some of Hollywood's most beloved bad movies. Depp played Wood with relentless, almost delusional optimism, refusing to let critical failure dent his enthusiasm for making films.

The role required a very different register than Edward Scissorhands, trading silence for constant, motormouthed energy. Depp studied archival interviews and behind-the-scenes footage of Wood to get his cadence and mannerisms right, despite the real man having died decades earlier.

Ed Wood was a box office disappointment on release, earning under $6 million domestically, but it became one of the most acclaimed films of Depp's career critically, and Martin Landau won an Academy Award for his supporting turn as Bela Lugosi.

Sleepy Hollow

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1999 · Directed by Tim Burton

Depp's third film with Burton reimagined Washington Irving's Ichabod Crane not as the gawky schoolteacher of the original story, but as a squeamish, fainting-prone constable investigating a series of headless murders in colonial New York, giving Depp room to play against traditional horror-hero expectations.

Depp has said he modeled Ichabod's nervous, overreactive physicality partly on silent film actors and partly on his own instinct to make an ostensible hero as unheroic as possible, a running theme across many of his Burton collaborations.

The film performed well commercially, grossing over $200 million worldwide, and its gothic, fog-drenched visual style became one of the defining aesthetics associated with the Burton-Depp partnership going into the 2000s.

Chocolat

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2000 · Directed by Lasse Hallstrom

Chocolat cast Depp in a supporting role as Roux, a river-traveling Irish traveler who becomes a romantic interest for Juliette Binoche's chocolatier in a small, tradition-bound French village. It was a smaller part than many of his lead roles from the period, but a notable one.

The film reunited Depp with director Lasse Hallstrom, who had directed him in What's Eating Gilbert Grape seven years earlier, and gave Depp a chance to work in a gentler, more romantic register than the horror and gothic roles he'd been leaning into.

Chocolat became a substantial awards-season success, earning five Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, and remains one of the more purely romantic films in Depp's filmography.

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl

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2003 · Directed by Gore Verbinski

Few casting decisions in modern blockbuster history have been as unlikely as Johnny Depp playing Captain Jack Sparrow. Depp based much of the character's slurred speech and swaying gait on Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, along with a dash of the cartoon skunk Pepe Le Pew, an approach Disney executives were reportedly nervous about before release.

Rather than playing a conventional swashbuckling hero, Depp made Sparrow unpredictable, cowardly, and constantly self-serving, which became the film's biggest asset rather than a liability. The performance earned Depp his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, a rare feat for what was originally conceived as a theme-park-ride movie.

The film's success launched one of Disney's biggest franchises, eventually spanning five films and grossing more than $4.5 billion worldwide, and it permanently reoriented Depp's career toward franchise-scale blockbusters alongside his smaller, stranger passion projects.

Not all treasure is silver and gold, mate.— Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean

Finding Neverland

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2004 · Directed by Marc Forster

Finding Neverland cast Depp as J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, dramatizing the real friendship between Barrie and a widowed mother and her four sons that inspired the creation of Neverland and its characters.

The role required a subtler, more restrained performance than Jack Sparrow had just a year earlier, and Depp's ability to move between those two registers in back-to-back years became a talking point among critics assessing his range.

Finding Neverland earned Depp his second Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and cemented a pattern that would define much of his 2000s output: alternating between big studio tentpoles and smaller, awards-focused dramatic work.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

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2005 · Directed by Tim Burton

Depp's fifth collaboration with Tim Burton reimagined Willy Wonka for a new generation, and Depp made the deliberate choice not to reference Gene Wilder's beloved 1971 performance at all, instead building an odder, more socially withdrawn Wonka with a clipped, almost childlike speech pattern.

The performance divided audiences on release, with some finding the interpretation too strange and others praising its commitment to a genuinely unsettling take on a character usually played as warm and whimsical.

Commercially, the film was a major success, grossing roughly $475 million worldwide against a $150 million budget, and it remains one of the most recognizable roles of Depp's career alongside Jack Sparrow.

The Directors

Who directed each of the 20 films.

Tim Burton directed 8 of the 20 films on this list, making him by far Depp's most frequent collaborator.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

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2006 · Directed by Gore Verbinski

The first Pirates sequel raised the scale considerably, introducing Bill Nighy's tentacle-faced Davy Jones and expanding Jack Sparrow's world with a debt owed to the ghostly captain of the Flying Dutchman, giving Depp a genuine adversary to play off rather than mostly human pirates and naval officers.

Depp leaned further into Sparrow's cowardice and self-interest this time around, letting the character's constant scheming and double-crossing become even more central to the plot than it had been in the first film.

Dead Man's Chest became a massive commercial success, grossing over $1 billion worldwide and setting box office records for its opening weekend at the time, cementing Sparrow as one of the most bankable characters in modern film.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

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2007 · Directed by Gore Verbinski

The trilogy capper brought back nearly the entire returning cast for a sprawling, multi-faction finale, including a resurrected Jack Sparrow rescued from Davy Jones' Locker in the film's opening act, giving Depp an extended stretch of dialogue with multiple versions of himself.

This was also the film that introduced Keith Richards on screen as Captain Teague, Jack's father, a piece of stunt casting that directly acknowledged the influence Richards had on Depp's performance from the very first film.

At World's End was, at the time of release, one of the most expensive films ever made, with a production budget around $300 million, and it went on to gross roughly $961 million worldwide.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

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2007 · Directed by Tim Burton

Depp's sixth film with Burton adapted Stephen Sondheim's musical about a wrongfully imprisoned barber who returns to London seeking revenge, and slitting the throats of his customers along the way. Notably, this required Depp to sing, something he had never done in a lead film role before.

Depp trained with a vocal coach for months to prepare, and his performance was recorded live during filming rather than dubbed afterward, a decision Burton made to preserve the raw, unpolished quality of the singing.

The role earned Depp his third Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and a Golden Globe win, proving his range extended even into musical theater despite having no prior professional singing background.

There is a place. Like no place on Earth.— The Mad Hatter, Alice in Wonderland

Public Enemies

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2009 · Directed by Michael Mann

Public Enemies cast Depp as real-life Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger, opposite Christian Bale as the FBI agent pursuing him. It was a rare instance of Depp playing a grounded, historically documented figure rather than an invented or heavily stylized character.

Depp trained extensively with period firearms to accurately handle the Thompson submachine guns and other weapons Dillinger's gang used, and director Michael Mann shot much of the film on digital video for an unusually immediate, textured look for a period piece.

The film performed respectably at the box office, grossing over $214 million worldwide, and gave Depp one of his more restrained, morally ambiguous roles of the decade, playing a criminal the public genuinely idolized in his own time.

Alice in Wonderland

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2010 · Directed by Tim Burton

Depp's seventh collaboration with Burton cast him as the Mad Hatter in a version of Alice in Wonderland that imagined Alice returning to Underland as a young woman rather than a child, with the Hatter reframed as a more central, emotionally damaged figure than in Lewis Carroll's original stories.

The film leaned heavily on early-2010s 3D technology and extensive CGI environments, with Depp's performance built around exaggerated makeup, bright orange hair, and a Scottish-inflected accent that shifted depending on the character's mental state.

Alice in Wonderland became a genuine box office phenomenon, grossing over $1 billion worldwide and becoming, at the time, one of only a handful of films to cross that threshold, making it the biggest commercial hit of Depp's career to that point.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

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2011 · Directed by Rob Marshall

The fourth Pirates film brought in a new director, Rob Marshall, and largely left behind the returning cast of the original trilogy, centering the story more tightly around Jack Sparrow himself alongside new characters played by Penelope Cruz and Ian McShane, in a hunt for the legendary Fountain of Youth.

Without Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley's characters to share the spotlight, Depp carried significantly more of the film's runtime solo, a shift that divided critics but didn't slow the franchise's box office momentum.

On Stranger Tides opened to the biggest international debut of any film at the time and went on to gross roughly $1.045 billion worldwide, making it, adjusted for the era, one of the most successful entries in the entire series.

Dark Shadows

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2012 · Directed by Tim Burton

Depp's eighth film with Burton adapted the cult 1960s gothic soap opera of the same name, casting him as Barnabas Collins, a vampire freed from his coffin after two centuries and forced to adjust to life in 1970s America while trying to restore his family's fortune.

The tonal mix of horror, comedy, and fish-out-of-water culture-shock jokes divided critics on release, with some finding the blend uneven, though Depp's committed, deadpan performance as a centuries-old aristocrat baffled by lava lamps and television drew consistent praise.

Dark Shadows grossed roughly $245 million worldwide, a solid if unspectacular return relative to some of the pair's earlier collaborations, and it marked, at the time, their eighth and one of their more divisive team-ups.

Black Mass

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2015 · Directed by Scott Cooper

Black Mass cast Depp as real-life Boston mobster and FBI informant James "Whitey" Bulger, in a role that required extensive prosthetic makeup, including thinning hair and pale contact lenses, to transform Depp's appearance almost entirely.

The performance marked a return to the kind of grounded, unglamorous dramatic work Depp had largely stepped away from during his blockbuster-heavy 2010s run, trading spectacle for a quiet, menacing stillness throughout the film.

Critics widely praised the performance as one of Depp's best in years, though the film's box office return was modest at just under $100 million worldwide, reflecting its smaller scale compared to his franchise work.

Everything in this room is eatable.— Willy Wonka, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Box Office Numbers

Worldwide grosses for each of the 20 films.

Figures reflect worldwide theatrical grosses and are approximate.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

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2017 · Directed by Joachim Ronning & Espen Sandberg

The fifth Pirates film brought back Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley's characters in supporting roles while introducing their son Henry, played by Brenton Thwaites, alongside a new villain in Javier Bardem's ghostly Captain Salazar, a Spanish naval officer with a grudge against Sparrow dating back decades.

By this point, more than a decade into playing the character, Depp's performance leaned into a slightly more world-weary version of Sparrow, still chaotic but visibly older and more worn down by his own choices.

Dead Men Tell No Tales grossed just under $796 million worldwide, making it the lowest-grossing entry in the franchise domestically, though it still performed strongly overseas, and remains, as of this writing, the most recent Pirates film to be released.

I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars, whiskey, and you.— John Dillinger, Public Enemies

Jeanne du Barry

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2023 · Directed by Maiwenn

Jeanne du Barry marked Depp's first film role following a highly publicized industry hiatus, and notably, it was a French production rather than a Hollywood one. Depp plays King Louis XV opposite director and co-star Maiwenn in the title role, delivering his lines in English within an otherwise French-language film.

The film premiered as the opening selection at the Cannes Film Festival, a high-profile platform that placed considerable attention on Depp's return to acting after years of intense public scrutiny surrounding his personal life.

Commercially modest by the standards of Depp's earlier blockbuster work, Jeanne du Barry nonetheless represented a symbolic milestone in his career, a European period drama rather than a franchise tentpole, and a clear signal of the more selective, character-driven roles he's pursued since.