Johnny Depp: An outlaw outlook

Much of the vivid look of his alter-egos sprouts from Depp's own fertile imagination. "You get these strong images in your head and you can't shake them," he explains. One of the first things he does when preparing for a role is to sketch out the character, or paint him in watercolor, like he did for Willy Wonka, and the Mad Hatter, and even Dillinger, allowing his brain to bounce along its own idiosyncratic metaphorical path. Jack Sparrow's famed coal-rimmed eyes weren't inspired by glam-rock but by Berber nomads who lined their orbs to protect them from the sun.

"I always do [sketches)" says Depp. "Don't know why. Just to kind of get an eyeball on the guy first."

Disney recently released early images from "Alice in Wonderland," and Depp's Hatter, of course, looks more than a little mad (some believe that hatters frequently suffered from mercury poisoning as mercury was once used to cure felt). "The orange-hair thing was very important. I think he was poisoned, very, very poisoned, and it was coming out through his hair, through his fingernails and eyes," says Depp, who later discovered happily that director Burton had done strikingly similar drawings of the character.

Dillinger fits perfectly into Depp's personal canon of larger-than-life rebels and outsiders. The outlaw also holds almost sentimental appeal for the star, whose Kentucky hometown is but three hours from the famed gangster's birthplace in Mooresville, Ind. Dillinger was just a wisecracking punk when he was sentenced to nine years in the penitentiary for his part in a drunken mugging (he didn't have a lawyer); he emerged as a hardened criminal, led a gang on a dozen bank robberies (hauling away $300,000, the equivalent of $4.8 million today), escaped from prison a couple of times, had a vicious shootout with the FBI, and finally went down in a hail of bullets outside a Chicago movie theater.

While researching his role, Depp searched madly for a voice recording of the outlaw but couldn't find one, although a recording of Dillinger's father turned out to be unexpectedly revelatory. "Hearing Dillinger's pop . . . These are guys I know. I knew him then," says Depp, "I wanted to salute my grandfather through Dillinger and salute Dillinger through my grandfather. You know, my grandfather drove a bus by day back in the '30s and ran moonshine by night."

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Feeling a bond