Johnny Vegas on Johnny Depp

Jan 5 2005 By Wil Marlow

Johnny Vegas is in full flow. He's telling the slightly bizarre story of how he got his part in the forthcoming Johnny Depp film The Libertine.

It's a typical Vegas-style stream of consciousness but it's rudely interrupted by his phone ringing.

"Ooh sorry," he says in that distinctive Lancashire rasp, taking out his phone. He presses a button and starts bawling.

"Look Mr Depp I have a life too," he says and hangs up.

"He's a borderline pest," he tuts.

"'Can you pick some milk up on your way home?'. No I can't. 'Full fat, no semi-skimmed. It's for me skin'."

Johnny's joking, of course, but the truth is the famously drunken comic - who's drinking a pint of lemonade today, but only because he's fending off the remnants of a hangover - does have his Hollywood namesake on speed-dial after they became good mates on the set of costume drama The Libertine.

"Mr Depp is very sociable," says Johnny.

"But it's virtually impossible to go out with him. Obviously we had the wrap party and we had a few parties at people's flats that we all went to. But if you went into town he would just get mobbed.

"Do you know the Father Ted episode where all the old women go mad? Like that. It's funny because when people do see him they just come up to him, stand about two yards away and stare.You're thinking, 'You must be able to think of something to say'. But they just stare, it's really weird.

"But he's fine with it. I keep wanting to tell people he's a bastard - he might be good looking, but he's a bastard. But he's not, he's a really down-to-earth bloke."

The Libertine could be the 33-year-old's big break in Hollywood. The lavish costume drama tells the story of the debauched 17th century poet John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, played by Depp. Johnny plays Rochester's friend Charles Sackville, among a stellar cast that also includes John Malkovich and Samantha Morton. Johnny got the part in a typically surreal manner.

"I was in the car coming from Heathrow," says Johnny, "and we stopped at the lights and in the car next to us there was a young child in the back and I'm waving at him. But I saw the dad looking at me and I thought, I don't want him to think I'm a weirdo, so I started showing pictures of me son through the window.

"But it turned out to be the director Laurence Dunmore driving the car. And he was just talking to his wife at that point about who to cast as Sackville. He told me after that she'd said, 'What about Johnny Vegas?' and he'd turned around and I was in the car with a photo of me kid going, 'He needs shoes, clothes. Give us a job!'.

"I have no problems whatsoever using my son to get me work - he'll be the one to suffer, not me!"

The release of The Libertine should herald a better year for Johnny after an up and down 18 months. In September of 2003 he split from his wife of less than a year, Kitty Donnelly, apparently because of his constant boozing and the pressures of looking after their baby son Michael.

The couple reportedly got back together recently - though it's not something the notoriously private comic is willing to talk about. Johnny, real name Michael Pennington, is said to have moved back into the north London home they once shared.

He's also getting over the fierce drubbing that his first major film release Sex Lives Of The Potato Men took, when critics almost universally panned it on its release.

"I went out and bought it," he says of the flop comedy.

"I'd only seen it twice and I saw it in a supermarket and bought it. And I like it. Sometimes I've been made to feel like I should be really apologetic for it but it was a film that we made about people that I know."