Johnny Depp's Rolling Stone interview does little to repair his big-spender reputation

Johnny Depp gave an interview to Rolling Stone and it's every bit as bonkers as you might expect.

In the story, published Thursday, reporter Stephen Roderick said it had taken 200 emails to get in a room with Depp, who brought him to his London home and indicated he was ready to "bare his soul about his empty bank accounts."

The veteran actor, 55, is locked in a legal battle with his former business managers over his dwindling fortune. Last year, he sued The Management Group for $25 million, alleging the company mismanaged nearly $400 million through fees he didn't agree to, incurring late fees via delinquent income tax filings and making loans to themselves and members of his entourage that he didn't approve. TMG promptly countersued him, saying he frittered away his own money on extravagances and ignored their warnings that he couldn't afford to keep spending at that pace.

If his intention for the interview (arranged by Depp's lawyer Adam Waldman, an American consultant with ties to Vladimir Putin) was to counteract the notion that he's out of touch with reality or knock down the reports of his outlandish spending — including $30,000 a month on wine, 14 pieces of real estate, an $18 million yacht and 45 luxury cars — it's not clear he succeeded.  He may have actually made his situation worse.

And because this is Depp, an acolyte of Hunter S. Thompson, there was some drug talk, too. Read for yourself: Here are a few of the most notable revelations from the story.

Depp had no idea he was behind on his taxes

"I just had no clue," the actor told Roderick, who observed the tax discussion was "one of the few moments when he looked genuinely worried" about his financial situation.

He accused TMG of paying his taxes late for 13 consecutive years, thereby incurring $6 million in late fees.

Depp continued, "If you're knowingly not paying the United States government taxes, somebody is gonna (expletive) catch up with you and hand you a bill and you'll probably go to the pokey."

Miriam Fisher, a tax attorney brought in by the actor's business managers to navigate a way out of the tax problems, sided with Depp on this issue. She told the magazine, "TMG had a lot of options, and they chose the worse one: make the IRS your creditor."

His accountants actually lowballed some of his most extravagant expenses

"It's insulting to say that I spent $30,000 on wine," says Depp of one of the more wasteful expenditures noted in the TMG lawsuit. "Because it was far more."

The same goes for the rocket he used to launch the ashes of his idol, Hunter S. Thompson, into the sky exactly one foot higher than the Statue of Liberty. "By the way, it was not $3 million to shoot Hunter into the (expletive) sky," he noted. "It was $5 million."

He said it was TMG's job to scold his Kentucky relatives about their spending

Depp continues to pay to maintain the Kentucky horse farm he bought his mother in the 1980s, despite the fact that she died in 2016. He says one of his sisters lives there with her husband and son, all of whom are on his payroll.

They spent so much that when Depp requested a breakdown of their expenses from financial manager Joel Mandel, the document ran 200 pages.

"Their thinking is that I'm going to take care of them forever and that the farm is now theirs," he says. "I didn't make that promise."

Asked why he didn't tell them to stop spending or even cut them off, he told Rodrick. "That's why I'm paying (TMG)."

Mandel told the reporter he would have been delighted to cut them off; however, he said Depp would never give him the green light to actually do it.

He didn't sell his St. Tropez estate after a tearful call from his daughter

In 2015, Mandel told Depp that in order to cover loans that were coming due, he'd need to do two movies and sell his French village near St. Tropez, which he'd shared with former partner Vanessa Paradis and their two children, Lily-Rose and Jack.

Depp was initially open to the idea of selling Hameau but ruled that out after Lily-Rose called him crying, begging him not to sell her childhood home.

Depp continued to waver on selling the property. Instead of cutting the price on the estate in hopes of a quick sale, Rodrick wrote that he kept raising it from its original price of $13 million to $27 million. At one point late in 2016, Variety put the price at $63 million. (He never did sell it or any of his other properties.)

The actor said he took his anger out on Mandel in a phone call, chastising him for not alerting him to his financial problems until it was almost too late. "Listen, you and I are going to have to (expletive) sit down and you're going to have to explain this (expletive) to me because I don't appreciate a phone call from you in the 11th hour," he said. "If you're going to call me, call me in the third hour."

By January 2016, things were so bad that Mandel informed Depp's employees they couldn't even buy houseplants. Depp fired TMG two months later.

He confirmed that a sound engineer fed him lines through an earpiece

Asked about an allegation in TMG's lawsuit that claimed he had lines fed to him through an earpiece on movie sets, Depp said it wasn't just for lines. A sound engineer also played him sound effects, which he said heightened his performance.

"I've got bagpipes, a baby crying and bombs going off," says Depp. "It creates a truth. Some of my biggest heroes were in silent film," he explained. "It had to be behind the eyes. And my feeling is, that if there's no truth behind the eyes, doesn't matter what the (expletive) words are."

​​​​​​He's sorry quaaludes went out of style

Depp expressed remorse that that the prescription sedative isn't as available for recreational use as it was once. (The drug was taken off the market in 1985 but remained popular until the 1990s and was allegedly used by Bill Cosby to subdue accuser Andrea Constand in the incident that led to his conviction.)

Why was he such a fan?

"They're made with just a little bit of arsenic, or strychnine so the high was far more immediate," he told the magazine, adding that when you took quaaludes, "you either wanted to smile and just be happy with your pals, or (expletive), or fight."

He would have used LSD instead of Seal Team Six on Osama bin Laden

"You get a bunch of (expletive) planes, big (expletive) planes that spray (expletive), and you drop LSD 25," he says. "You saturate the (expletive) place. Every single thing will walk out of their cave smiling, happy."

He once roomed with a bank robber and gave his roommates scabies

Depp recalled coming home from a cheap hotel to the flophouse he shared with roommates during his early days in L.A. Within hours he said, everyone was scratching themselves furiously. After shaving his body, he found the culprit: mites.

"I gave everyone scabies," Depp said. "You know how hard it is to tell your roommates that?"

On the upside, he noted, "My roommate couldn't say much. He was a bank robber." '

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