Lily-Rose Depp On ‘The Idol’ And Her Not-So-Normal Childhood — Cannes – Deadline

“When was the last truly f*cking nasty, nasty, bad pop girl?” This is the query posed within the teaser trailer to HBO’s The Idol, which guarantees the form of lurid, adrenaline-pumping pop-culture exposé you’d see if Paul Verhoeven was ever allowed to make a movie like Showgirls once more. Said trailer additionally options copious portions of cocaine, champagne and critically soiled dancing, suggesting a warts-and-all drama a few super-ambitious Madonna/Lady Gaga sort who has just lately hit the massive time within the dog-eat-dog world of showbiz.

That, in itself, could be a dangerous position for any younger actress, particularly since The Idol has already been within the information for its turbulent manufacturing, overseen by director Sam Levinson, whose envelope-pushing sequence Euphoria was labelled “pointlessly gratuitous” by the barely conservative Esquire journal. Hats off, then, to Lily-Rose Depp — daughter of Johnny and French pop singer Vanessa Paradis, and goddaughter of the controversy-besieged goth rocker Marilyn Manson — for braving the position of Jocelyn, a singer on the rebound who falls underneath the affect of shady nightclub impresario Tedros (Abel Tesfaye, aka The Weeknd).

Though she’s nonetheless solely 23, Depp went into performing almost a decade in the past, when she made her debut alongside Kevin Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn in Smith’s Tusk, an orgy of nepotism that will need to have seen the current ‘nepo baby’ witch hunt coming. The pair reteamed in one other Smith film, Yoga Hosers (2016), one other horror-comedy, through which they performed comfort retailer clerks attacked by occult Nazi sausages. It was each a industrial flop and, to rattling it with faint reward, Smith’s finest movie in 10 years.

Somehow, Depp’s performing profession has gone underneath the radar up to now, regardless of roles alongside names like Timothée Chalamet in The King (2019) and Keira Knightley in Silent Night (2021). With a high-profile undertaking like The Idol, which follows status serial TV similar to Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) and Irma Vep (2022) into the official Cannes lineup, Depp must navigate her personal life as a display screen idol fairly rapidly, a standing she’s already given thought to. “People want you to be larger than life and somebody that they can aspire to be like or look up to,” she has mentioned, “but also relatable enough to make them feel comfortable.”

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To play the a part of Jocelyn, Depp went additional than asking her mother and father what life was like within the ’90s, which, on reflection, might need saved everybody lots of time. “I thought about movie stars of the ’40s, like Lauren Bacall and Gene Tierney,” she mentioned. “They didn’t walk into a room and descend to anybody else’s level to try and make them feel comfortable. They almost had this confidence in the discomfort that they could provoke in people. A thing of, ‘This is who I am, and I’m not going to change.’”

The elephant within the room, in fact, is the very public fall from grace of Depp Sr. — star of opening night time movie Jeanne du Barry — whose infamous libel trial made unending headlines final 12 months. Asked by Vice in regards to the blessing/curse of celeb parentage, Depp confirmed an encouraging stage of self-awareness. “I feel like my parents did the best job that they possibly could at giving me the most ‘normal childhood’ that they could,” she mentioned. “And obviously, that still was not a normal childhood. I’m really lucky that I’ve been surrounded by people who value normalcy and who value real life, and I think that’s the only way to exist in this world and not go insane.”