From Baby Face to 'Cry-Baby' : Profile: Johnny Depp of Fox's '21 Jump Street' plays a juvenile delinquent in his first starring film role. The teen idol insists he'll never do another TV series again.

No, it's Johnny Depp, the 26-year-old star of Fox Television's "21 Jump Street," describing the skewed odds of his ever agreeing to act in a TV series again now that his four-season commitment to the show is up. He's grateful that the series gave him the leverage to work with big-screen directors like John Waters and Tim Burton, but now that his first starring role in a feature film--Waters' satirical "Cry-Baby"--is set to unspool in theaters Friday, he shows about as much propensity to look back at his small-screen past as a warrior escaping Medusa's lair.

"I don't want to bite the hand that feeds me or anything like that," said Depp in his publicist's West Hollywood office, preparing to bare just a little incisor over his dissatisfaction with "Jump Street's" hip-hunks-with-heat premise. "But I would much rather do movies with John Waters than be undercover in a high school carrying a gun. Cops undercover in high school, in my opinion, is borderline fascist. (But) I don't sign the checks. I'm a puppet."

Depp has been likened to a modern James Dean, so it may seem odd to some that for his starring debut in a motion picture, anxiously awaited by thousands upon thousands of heartsick young girls, he picked a project in which he essentially parodies that image.

It is--if you want to continue the analogy--as if Dean had followed up "Rebel Without a Cause" with some lighthearted Frank Tashlin romp. "Cry-Baby," which Depp describes as akin to " 'Grease' on hallucinogens," is a campy farce with no redeeming social value and nary a serious or realistic moment. Which is just the way Depp likes it, for now, after his very straight-faced "Jump Street" experience.

"Maybe" it's a risk to take such a comic turn this early in his career, he conceded, "but for me it's the only thing to do. I hate that in order to sell a TV show and sell a product, it involves exploiting one person or another, and I had no control over any of those commercials that went \o7 DEPP DEPP DEPP\f7 ," he says, mocking the deep voice that gravely intoned his singular last name--a la \o7 STALLONE\f7 or \o7 SCHWARZENEGGER\f7 --in the ad campaign Fox developed for the show after Depp's stardom among the under-18 set exploded.

"It was such a shock to me to see it. If I had had control over that and the posters and the amount of merchandising, I would have put the kibosh on it a long time ago. But unfortunately, when you're starting out and they have product to sell, they shove you down America's throat, basically. It's pretty ugly. So to be able to make fun of all that under John Waters' wing was important to me.

"I felt fortunate not having to pose with a revolver in my hand and kiss a girl wearing Lycra and do the same old expected leading-man stuff. Whenever a young actor comes out, they have to pin him with some sort of label so they call him a bad boy or that horrible word \o7 rebel\f7 , which is so played out and stupid. This made fun of people's perceptions. It was really the only way I wanted to go."

The bangs that keep loping over Depp's face as he essays the title role of the '50s-themed "Cry-Baby" may seem like part of the joke, but in person he really does have a lock of dark hair that keeps rebounding back into place over his forehead, though the grease, of course, is absent. Faint traces of mustache and goatee highlight his face, and alongside his engagement ring--the fiancee being actress Winona Ryder--is a Green Hornet decoder ring, complete with secret compartment. Despite his handsome, all-American TV image, Depp in person is long-haired, loosely funky enough and unglamorous to seem more a Keanu Reeves type than a James Dean type.

"He looks like that mostly when he's in Los Angeles," pointed out director Waters in a separate interview. "It's the anti-star mentality. But I think Johnny is an \o7 ultimate\f7 movie star, and I mean that in a very positive way--I'm a firm believer in movie stars. That's how I wanted him to look in 'Cry Baby,' because he's playing a movie star--almost."

Waters came upon the idea of casting Depp, he says, when "halfway through writing it I thought, 'Oh God, who's gonna play this?' I went and bought all the teen magazines--everything that he hates--and saw him and thought he'd be perfect for it. So I called him and said, 'I have this movie about a juvenile delinquent whose father got the electric chair'--I didn't try to make it sound normal.

"And he really laughed; he liked my old stuff too. I just wanted to make sure he had a sense of humor. He did this one little sneer in our first meeting which summed it all up, and I knew that, hey, Johnny Depp \o7 is\f7 Cry-Baby."

And then there's the typecasting factor. Waters enthuses: "Johnny \o7 was\f7 a juvenile delinquent!"