Johnny Depp comes to school to help 9-year-old mutiny against teachers

Johnny Depp staged a cute publicity stunt yesterday, showing up at a south London school where a 9-year-old student had sent him a letter asking for help in staging a mutiny against her teachers:

He said nine-year-old Beatrice had written to Captain Jack, asking him to lead a mutiny against her teachers.
Depp, 47, has been filming the latest instalment of the franchise in London.
After his arrival, a special school assembly was called and the film star - along with other members of the cast dressed in full costume - walked in.
Depp produced Beatrice's letter and performed for the children for 15 minutes.
But he told the schoolgirl that a mutiny might get them into trouble.

Pirate Johnny Depp makes surprise school visit

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Howard Q. Bikeman

The girl didn’t ask for a bunch of Hollywood actors to come perform skits, she asked for a d*mn mutiny! Worst surprise pirate visit ever.
- Anonymous
  
  For the win!
pinehead

That was pretty cool of him to gather up a few of the guys and head over to Beatrice’s classroom to say hi. Not many kids can say they were visited by THE Captain Jack Sparrow. I’d imagine much of his time is consumed with swashbuckling and sword fighting.
Daedalus

It’s cool. Don’t really matter if it’s a publicity stunt or not, it’s cool.

But if the kid wants a mutiny, she’ll have to lead her own.
Anon022

Haters gon’ hate.

I think more celebs should do things like this. It’s more personable than just throwing some money at a charity.
Anonymous

The school is immediately next door to where they’re filming right now, the kids could probably see the actors out on set every time they went to and from school, and johnny probably stopped by on a lunch break (the bbc article says he only gave the school a few minutes warning). It’s just awesome that that girl thought to actually write them a letter :-)
Anonymous

In my opinion It is a nice action of Johnny Depp , some members of the cast get 15 minutes of your time to spend with these children. I think Beatriz was very happy , is very nice to be around someone you admire, but it should be even better to respond to a letter especially when someone as famous and is unlikely to do so anyway as a child never lose hope that is the age at which our imagination grow up. I like that he told the schoolgirl that a mutiny might get them into trouble.
xzzy

I think this should be the fourth movie. Jack Sparrow touring schools, building an army of kids he uses overthrow the government.

(probably better than whatever they currently have for a script)
knoxblox

Jack Sparrow is going to be so disappointed when he finds out the strongest brew they have in the cafeteria is chocolate milk.
Rockslide

PR stunt or not, I love stuff like this and wish more celebrities would step down and do fun things for the fans. They are where they are because of the fans.
Powell

Grumpy Cory. You are just jealous a pirate didnt come visit you at school. Depp is a good dude. He has done this kinda thing before.
http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2009/06/hey-big-tipper-johnny-depp-tips-waiter-4000
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-508227/Johnny-Depps-1m-gift-Great-Ormond-Street-hospital-saved-daughters-life.html
http://hollywoodcrush.mtv.com/2009/07/06/johnny-depp-visits-childrens-hospital-dressed-as-jack-sparrow/
Sapa

mmmmm Johnny Depp

Am composing letter…..
“dear Johnny Depp, erm please come to anywhere close to where I live and lead a mutiny against anyone you like ?”
“dear Johnny Depp, being a pirate myself I would like to ask your aid in carrying out mutiny…?”
Anonymous

luckiest little girl EVER
Phikus

Capt. Sparrow truly is amazing to be able to travel through time to visit a classroom in 2010. Though no mutiny was staged, to keep his rep up, he did toss a cat in a bin on his way out. Hitler got very upset at this, and Keanu also became sad. At least one cat was astonished, and many others provided commentary via misspelled captions. A chipmunk glared malevolently and a mustachioed gentleman shouted “You done goofed!” The word “FAIL” mysteriously appeared out of thin air, and rainbow gazers everywhere pondered it’s meaning. Lady Gaga stopped sucking a unicorn’s blood for a moment to mutter “Meh” and Justin Beiber threatened to have his servers secede.

Lighten up, folks.
Kimmo

Johnny Depp rocks so much, I’m sure it’s completely normal for straight guys like myself to have a total man-crush on him.

<3 Depp
Eric Ragle

Cameras or no, it was a good thing for Mr. Depp to do. We need more of that sort of awesome in this world.
Anonymous

The school got 10 minutes warning he was coming – probably just enough time to drive over from the set. Hardly enough time to get media there. The video is from someone’s phone. He does this stuff to be nice – Johnny Depp gets plenty of publicity on his own.

He brought a lot of happiness to that school. He is a high school dropout and the idea of a school mutiny was probably appealing, but he said the police were outside.
IronEdithKidd

Haters be damned. This is absolutely full of awesomesauce.
Anonymous

I saw a photo someone took when this happened! The little girl had her hands inside her overalls like in the video, which prompted my roommate to ask, “Are her hands in her pants?”
With only a moment’s thought, I replied, “No, but mine would be!”
Johnny Depp is both hot and good with children.
Trnck

I was afraid that he would pull out a medieval gun.
zapan

Depp, 47, has been filming…

There is no such thing, this guy does not age, like at all !
The pitch of the last Pirates is really well though, cause I really think he found some kind of fountain of youth somehow (maybe the secret is living in the desert with a french girl, like he does).
kmoser

And we know this is the real Johnny Depp how?
- odaiwai
  
  It’s a blurry, jumpy, barely audible video of something which might look like something sort of resembling Mr. Depp. By the Laws of Sneaked Product Photos, it can’t be anything other than the TRUTH.
  
  Or maybe it’s the new iPad. Kind of hard to tell.
Brainspore

In my book the classiest thing Depp has ever done was to lend his voice to a disabled young man who was unable to speak for an episode of the “This American Life” TV show. (Ira Glass had asked the kid what voice he would like to stand in for his own and he responded -via computer- “Johnny Depp or Ed Norton, because they are both badasses.”)

Everything about this story is awesome except that some people apparently think we need to continue the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise. Seriously Hollywood, did you even SEE “At World’s End”?
- Talia
  
  At world’s end was awesome. :p
  
  But aside from that, I agree. They really shoulda stopped at three. This can’t possibly end well.
  
  Good on Johnny Depp for making a memorable day for those kids and teachers, regardless of it being a PR stunt or not.
Oldboy

I prefer to imagine that Mr. Depp happened to see this letter in his personal mail, or perhaps had it passed to him by one of his assistants. When he read it, he was so charmed by the idea of thrilling a classroom full of small children that he approached the director with the idea and got his permission to take off for the day to do this stunt.

And this idea warms my heart to no end.
Donald Petersen

I like this guy.
bat21

I’m so glad Johnny Depp stopped taking himself seriously.
Muninn

Well, for publicity or not it seems like a very cool thing to do. It would be something those kids are going to remember for a very long time.
Anonymous

I’m with those saying it’s just a classy guy doing a classy deed. There’s no evidence of a PR stunt. Sometimes people are just nice.
forzaq8

I don’t believe that a PR stunt , because if it was that would have been epic fail , need a better clip and more recognizing that this
Phikus

It’s all fun and games ’til they lead the kid away in irons for attempting to incite a mutiny.
- Anonymous
  
  Shouldn’t she be forced to walk the plank? Of course now I’m imagining the school building sailin onward, ala “the Crimson Permanant Assurance.”
Cory Doctorow

The reason I call it a PR stunt is that Depp brought along a camera crew and then sent the video to the major news networks (cf the linked BBC article)
- Thalia
  
  If this had been a publicity stunt the video quality would’ve been better, and there would have been reporters there. The BBC report doesn’t suggest that the reporter was there, and the source of the video is something sent to a children’s program on BBC.
  - Cory Doctorow
    
    The video on the BBC’s site *is* higher quality. The YouTube clip appears to have been camcordered from a TV. They didn’t bring a reporter, they brought their own cameras.
    - zunjine
      
      Oh hush – the footage on the BBC website clearly isn’t from a film camera. I can’t find any high quality footage anywhere. If you know of any please do pop a link in, there’s a good chap. ;)
barnaby_s

BBC Breakfast News had this, along with the fact that one of the reporters children goes to this school.

When the child came home to and told the reporter he claims not to have believed them.
turn_self_off

Oh the irony. Why is anyone surprised that kids “pirate” when the media corps are going all about about making pirates cool? But then again, record labels have been glamorizing the gansta life for a decade now…
knutmo

Next time, send Jack Parow.
- Anonymous
  
  Exactly right. That would be a party.
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRzFqW4Xh2k
Anonymous

Christ, what an awesome
zunjine

What a bunch of cynics you are! Publicity stunt?! Publicity stunt!?! First of all, what would be the point of a publicity stunt a year or more ahead of the release of the film? Secondly, even if it did make sense they wouldn’t need this stunt. The film will have tens of millions spent in advertising and PR when it comes to launch time and will be covered by every news outlet and agency worth thinking about. You don’t send you star on a publicity stunt that will only have minimal impact.

Can we not just say this was a really nice thing that they wanted to do to make some kids smile? Do we have to imagine there’s always some hidden motive? The cameras they took, if indeed they did take any, were probably recording this just incase they wanted to stick it on the Blu Ray when the time comes. Woolly Jeebus! Some people need to relax and start trusting a bit more.
- Anonymous
  
  1. This will not merely have minimal impact. It will be remembered and will have a huge impact when the movie comes out. People are still referring to the Ormond Street stuff nearly 3 years later. So a year from now when the article comes out people will remember this and will be linking to these articles again.
  
  2. Not only is it good publicity for the movie it is good publicity for Depp personally as well. It adds to his uber good guy image, an image that he/his publicity people, his fans and the media have been hard selling for the past few years.
  
  No, it doesn’t mean that what he did wasn’t nice or that it didn’t make the kids happy, even if it was a publicity stunt. But neither Cory nor anyone else said that. People are really being over sensitive.
Anonymous

Zunjine, I think I love you.

I’ve been reading BoingBoing for years and am starting to find the cynicism and pee-on-your-parade attitude in the comments so depressing recently. Can’t we just embrace the fact that there are some really nice people in the world, some of them (shock!), may even be famous. Nice one, Mr Depp.
- That_guy
  
  totally agree with anon and Zunjine. there are actually nice people out there. from what i’ve learned, the people who call foul, only call it because it’s what they would do themselves. kinda like, who ever smelt it dealt it…
- zunjine
  
  Oh stop it! You’ll make me blush! ;)
  
  I must agree there do seem to be more and more people who just can’t accept goodness and kindness as what it is. The odd thing is that, in my experience, most people you meet are very decent. Perhaps it’s that very fact that kindness is so common that on the rare occasion we meet a real arsehole the very strangness of it makes it stick in our minds.
  
  Humans have an innate sense of fairness and violating it makes people very upset. This would account for our heightened anger response to relatively small trespasses. It follows that we try hard to avoid having our sense of fairness violated. This would perhaps explain how cynical people can be; after all, you can’t have your feelings hurt unless you trust people. So, in an odd way, the fact we are so cynical should tell us how little reason we have to be so.
pidg

Big Hollywood are preying on the minds of our children with evil PR stunts like this. Won’t somebody think of the children???
invisible_al

Apparently he does this sort of stuff all the time, have a look round for the story about his visit to Great Ordmond Street to read the kids stories while playing Jack Sparrow. They treated his daughter when she almost died so he did it to give something back (in addition to the 1$ million donation). The other cool thing about it, it didn’t show up in the papers until months later as he did it in secret. Sounds like he’s just a nice guy.
Ultan

Isn’t anyone else disappointed that he didn’t actually lead a mutiny? And where’s his sword? Stupid British anti-leading-a-mutiny-in-a-school-with-a-razor-sharp-saber laws. Arr.
marilove

He’s been known to do this kind of stuff before. A few old co-workers of mine met him at Disneyland once. It was some kind of planned thing, but apparently he was awesome and put himself out there more than anyone else and tried to talk to as many people as he could. He really, really seems to understand that his fans are what make his life possible, especially the young ones.

He’s probably one heck of a father, uncle, etc. I bet he likes to tell lots of stories and entertain kids a lot. How much fun would it to be his niece or nephew?!
Lobster

47? Wow…

Would be wonderful if he tried this in the States. He’d be in Gitmo right now.
Anonymous

That was epic. Here’s a nice photo: http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/newsid_9070000/newsid_9071900/9071940.stm
Anonymous

Nice improv. Not that I needed convincing that he’s a good actor, but this is a nice demonstration of his talents.

I mean if it were a persistent ‘character’ like Hugh Grant or Samuel L Jackson it would do nothing for me (as they don’t really act, they just read lines), but this is good stuff
Suburbancowboy

Johnny Depp is considered one of the nicest and most gracious celebs in Hollywood, so this does not surprise me:

“Autograph magazineâ€™s annual list of the â€œ10 Best and 10 Worst Hollywood Signers.

Johnny has been voted for the third year in a row the most gracious and approachable celebrity when fans ask for autographs.”
areyouthatguy

From all the available evidence, Johnny really likes playing Capt. Jack Sparrow at any given opportunity.

Wouldn’t you?