Lily-Rose Depp Is An Idol Rising
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Jocelyn is a machine. Jocelyn gyrates like a Tilt-A-Whirl and favors spangled outfits that look like they’re held together by dental floss. Underboob, throngs of paparazzi, nightclubs, cocaine, and S&M feature prominently in her lifestyle, at least if the trailer for HBO’s upcoming blockbuster series The Idol is anything to go by.
Jocelyn also couldn’t be further from the self-effacing woman I’m speaking to, who (a) apologizes for being a few minutes late to our interview because she’s dealing with a gastrointestinally challenged cat, and (b) goes on to note how important punctuality is to her.
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Later today, on set, she’ll transform back into the vampish pop star, but right now, at her mom’s place in Los Angeles, Lily-Rose Depp is dressed down in a plain black camisole, her shoulder-length hair slightly tousled. The only thing she seems to share with her character is a sultry voice, which sounds as if a Juul took human form.
But when she stepped into Jocelyn’s platform stilettos, the 23-year-old model and actress found that singing and memorizing choreography weren’t the biggest challenges to completing her pop-princess metamorphosis. “It was more about understanding how alone you can feel, even when everybody’s watching you,” Depp says.
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Think of the moments of mundane heartache that run beneath the surface of otherwise glamorous lives: Katy Perry sobbing under the stage in Katy Perry: Part of Me; Madonna taking time out from her Blonde Ambition tour to visit her mother’s grave in Madonna: Truth or Dare; or any paparazzi footage of Britney Spears circa 2007. The titular idol of the series—co-created and executive produced by Sam Levinson (Euphoria), Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd, and Reza Fahim—isn’t explicitly modeled after any of these women, though Depp does name-check Madonna, Spears, and Mariah Carey as reference points.
“There’s nothing more fun to me than sinking my teeth into something and trying to understand it through and through,” she says, adding that she also looked beyond the concert arena for inspiration—to Old Hollywood figures like Gene Tierney in Laura and Lauren Bacall, as well as their across-the-pond counterparts Jeanne Moreau and Romy Schneider. Depp doesn’t just share sloe eyes with those classic stars—she has a similar craving for mystique.
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Her predilection for privacy isn’t surprising: Fame is something she’s had to spend a lifetime grappling with as the daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis. Growing up, “my parents protected my brother [Jack] and me from it as much as possible,” she says. “I know my childhood didn’t look like everybody’s childhood, and it’s a very particular thing to deal with, but it’s also the only thing that I know.”
Similarly, she’s chosen to avoid commenting on the recent headlines about her famous father: “When it’s something that’s so private and so personal that all of a sudden becomes not so personal…I feel really entitled to my secret garden of thoughts. I also think that I’m not here to answer for anybody, and I feel like for a lot of my career, people have really wanted to define me by the men in my life, whether that’s my family members or my boyfriends, whatever. And I’m really ready to be defined for the things that I put out there.”
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Even though Depp’s mother is a huge star in her native France, Paradis’s kids mostly got to see her as Mom. “It was really cool for me and my brother to see our mom being the ultimate comforting and loving person, but also having such a rich, full life of her own, watching her go onstage and sing for thousands of people, and just be so in her own zone and in touch with herself and her art.” As a little kid, Depp idolized her mom to the point that she’d ask her what she was going to wear that day, then pull a similar look out of her own closet so that she could be her mom’s mini-me.
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With this new role, Depp is again following in her mom’s chart-topping footsteps. Though confronting fame as an adult has been “a weird thing to navigate,” she admits: “It’s different experiencing it firsthand rather than by proxy. I guess it’s something that I’ve had to make my own way with.”
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She delineates the distinction between “real-life Lily-Rose” and her more reserved public self. “I say ‘real life’ as if there are two realities,” Depp adds, though for her, there almost are. With friends, she’s “an open book,” she says. “But I’ve just been raised in a manner that has taught me that privacy is something that’s important to protect.” She doesn’t have Twitter (“because I don’t feel like there’s anything I want to say that I can’t say through my work”), and her Instagram is a sedate chronicle of her past and upcoming acting projects and Chanel ads; she’s been an ambassador for the brand since she was 16. She went into her acting career with the idea that “I am here to do my job, and what I really want to put out into the world is my work.”
Not that the work has zero overlap with her life these days. Playing Jocelyn has only caused her to think more critically about the trade-offs that inevitably come with public scrutiny. “It’s kind of a double-edged sword, because when you’re an artist, you make things in the hope that they’re going to connect with somebody. But then it also comes with this thing where people feel like they know you, even though they don’t,” she says. “I’m not here to give myself to the world to be eaten alive.”
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When strangers approach her in public, she fears not for her safety, but “that they’re going to think I’m really weird or rude because I just get really shy and kind of anxious,” Depp says. And unfortunately, the anxiety has not dissipated with age and experience. “The older I get, the weirder I become around that whole conversation,” she says. “That’s why I like to do my work and put as much of my heart into it as I can and then retreat back into my real life and just be a normal person.”
On social media, the discomfort is magnified. “People think that you’re a video game character and say all these horrible things about you that they would never say to your face,” she says. “I think we feel a little too protected by our screens.” Increasingly, especially for her generation, there’s little difference between the two. “We spend a lot of time on the internet, and you start to feel like it’s this parallel universe where people in the public eye are just an animal in a zoo or a statue, and you can say whatever the fuck you want to them, even though you wouldn’t say it in person.
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People get really ballsy when they think nobody’s looking or reading, and so I try not to read [comments] because no matter what you do, you’re never going to please everybody. I can work my ass off to put work out there that I’m proud of and that I hope people will connect with, but there are always going to be some people who don’t like me or have a problem with me or think that I’m stupid or ugly or whatever,” she says. “At the end of the day, what really matters to me is what my family and friends and loved ones think of me.”
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Speaking of internet opinions, has she heard about the whole “nepo baby” conversation? She laughs dryly: “I’m familiar.” Depp sounds resigned to it, which is maybe all one can be in her situation. “The internet seems to care a lot about that kind of stuff. People are going to have preconceived ideas about you or how you got there, and I can definitely say that nothing is going to get you the part except for being right for the part,” she says. “The internet cares a lot more about who your family is than the people who are casting you in things. Maybe you get your foot in the door, but you still just have your foot in the door. There’s a lot of work that comes after that.”
She does find it “interesting,” however, that she rarely hears anyone refer to a man as a nepo baby. “It’s weird to me to reduce somebody to the idea that they’re only there because it’s a generational thing. It just doesn’t make any sense. If somebody’s mom or dad is a doctor, and then the kid becomes a doctor, you’re not going to be like, ‘Well, you’re only a doctor because your parent is a doctor.’ It’s like, ‘No, I went to medical school and trained.’ ” Ever careful, she’s quick to add that she is by no means comparing her own work to that of someone in the medical field. “I just hear it a lot more about women, and I don’t think that it’s a coincidence.”
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In one of The Idol trailers, Jocelyn says, “There’s nothing about me that’s relatable.” It’s a refreshing one-liner in an age when we want our stars to be constantly available, accessible, down-to-earth, and maybe even one aisle over from us at Target. What we expect from celebrities has become almost untenable, Depp observes. “People want you to be larger than life and somebody that they can aspire to be like or look up to, but also relatable enough to make them feel comfortable. I don’t think people want to feel too far away from the people they idolize, but they want to feel far enough away to look up to them, I guess.”
That’s where the Tierneys and Bacalls came in. “The stars of that time didn’t shy away from their stardom,” Depp says. “I mean, I didn’t know them personally, obviously, but when you watch their movies, they don’t walk into a room and try to get down to everybody’s level. There’s an aura of confidence. We didn’t always expect our idols to be just like us. And I think that there’s an interesting conversation there about what we expect of them now.”
Depp’s audition process for the show was pretty standard for pandemic times: self-tape; Zoom; chemistry read with the male lead (who just happened to be The Weeknd). She was genuinely stunned by the result. “I did not think at all that this was going to go my way,” she says. “I know that everybody and their mother goes in for these things.” She calls her casting “the best surprise ever. I’ll never forget getting that call. I still have all these pinch-me moments all the time. I can’t believe they wanted me to do it.”
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She feels blessed to be working with Levinson and Tesfaye, “two people who make me feel incredibly safe and protected,” she says. “I think it’s difficult to do this kind of work that can be so vulnerable in so many different ways if you don’t have a lot of trust between you and your collaborators.” She considers Tesfaye, whose acting CV includes a cameo in Uncut Gems and a few voice roles, “a really good friend who’s had my back,” she says. “We’ve gone on this wild ride together. It was a first for both of us in a lot of ways.”
As for Levinson, Depp sees him as a visionary. “The way he’ll come up with things on the fly and just try things—it feels like the most beautiful, magical, creative playground that I’ve ever been on,” she says. “It’s a beautiful process working with him, because he draws from the person who’s right in front of him and what he already sees in you as a person, and he finds ways to weave that into your character. He has a really good eye for that.”
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Levinson, however, credits the eagle eye of his wife, Ashley Levinson (who’s also an executive producer of The Idol), for finding the series’ star. “The moment Ash saw Lily-Rose’s audition, she said she was Jocelyn,” he says. “It was true—she was sensational. HBO always has a lengthy audition process, but they knew it, too. She’s also just one of the best collaborators you could wish for. She can act, she can sing, and her and Abel’s chemistry is off the charts.”
For a series that prides itself on its provocativeness, there’s an appealingly Mickey-and-Judy, let’s-put-on-a-show aspect to the proceedings, at least as Depp reports it. The group, seemingly assembled by Mad Libs, includes Troye Sivan, Dan Levy, Jane Adams, and indie darling Rachel Sennott (“You are going to die when you see Rachel,” Depp says. “I fucking love her. We’re very close”), along with fellow ELLE cover girl and real-life pop star Jennie. “It’s rare for a group of people who don’t know each other and who are all different ages and from different walks of life to mesh so well,” she says. “Everybody’s energy really clicked.”
Depp also has two big film projects on the horizon: The Governesses, with Hoyeon and Renate Reinsve, two actresses who will also be following up star-making roles in Squid Game and The Worst Person in the World, respectively, and Nosferatu, opposite Bill Skarsgård. But in the calm before the storm of HBO omnipresence, Depp is enjoying her quiet (and very real) life—and experiencing something of a second adolescence at home with family and away from her home base of New York City.
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“My brother and I are super close, so it’s been cool to fight over what’s in the fridge again or whatever,” she says with a laugh. She’s also catching up on her reading. “I feel weird if I don’t have a book,” she says, calling it “a safe thing to feel like I have another world that I can retreat into.” She runs to fetch her current comfort read, Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.(“He’s one of my favorite authors ever,” she says. “I started reading him in high school.”) “I kind of did myself in this summer,” she adds. “I read Blue Nights by Joan Didion, and then I read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. I was on a blue thing, I guess. And both of those books were just so profound and beautiful and heartbreaking in their own way.”
It’s hard to reconcile the “real-life” Depp, with her books and sibling tiffs and beloved cat, with the character she’s about to play on the small screen in the coming months. But the provocative, sexually charged nature of the show, and the added scrutiny that comes with it, doesn’t intimidate her. “I’m not interested in making anything puritanical. I’m not interested in making anything that doesn’t challenge me, or challenge other people, honestly,” she says. “I think this show is fearless, and that’s something that I’ve been really excited and proud to dive into. I can’t wait for you guys to see it.”
Hair by Gregory Russell for Pureology Pureology Professional Color Care; makeup by Marcelo Gutierrez for Chanel Beauty; manicure by Marisa Carmichael for Chanel Le Vernis; set design by Ali Gallagher at 11th House Agency; produced by Viewfinders.
This article appears in the December 2022 / January 2023 issue of ELLE.
