Johnny Depp has made a career out of playing eccentrics, geniuses, drunks and a swaggering pirate named Capt. Jack Sparrow.
So, it should come as no surprise that Depp has signed on to play John McAfee, the hard-living, high-flying Silicon Valley creator of McAfee antivirus software in the upcoming dark comedy “King of the Jungle.”
Depp is starring in the latest installment of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, due in theaters May 26. This move by Depp to play the tech pioneer could either be a brilliant bit of typecasting or another case of the actor thinking he’s stretching himself creatively by playing a part where he will no doubt get many opportunities to chew the scenery but in ways that might be tiresomely familiar to him or to audiences.
Also, it might not be that much of a stretch for Depp, 53, to be playing someone like McAfee, an aging, uber-rich man with extravagant tastes and spending habits — and a penchant for ego-driven, self-destructive behavior.
An explosive report last week in the Hollywood Reporter depicts Depp as an out-of-control star who frittered away more than $650 million he earned over a 13-year period of making one hit movie after another. While filming the upcoming “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” in Australia in 2015, Depp was reportedly a menace, drinking heavily, getting into physical fights with then-wife Amber Heard and chronically late to the set, the Reporter said.
The bad publicity that followed Depp’s nasty split from Heard last May has Walt Disney Studios executives worried about whether the star’s woes will affect box office for the “Pirates” movie, the Reporter story said. This “Pirates” is the fifth installment in the franchise.
In his own more spectacular way, McAfee, now 71, was pretty high-maintenance himself, according to a 2012 Wired story on which “King of the Jungle” will be based.
McAfee, born in Virginia, had a father who was a heavy drinker who regularly beat him and his mother and who shot himself to death when he was 15, the Wired story said.
McAfee inherited his father’s self-destructive ways. As a 38-year-old engineer at Santa Clara-based Omex in the early 1980s, he was doing lines of cocaine at his desk and polishing off a bottle of scotch every day before he decided to get sober — for a time anyway — and build his software company.
His eponymous company capitalized on people’s emerging paranoia about computer viruses at the dawn of the high-tech age. It also gave him a fortune that allowed him to fill nine homes with art work and amass a fleet of cars.
But when his finances took a hit in the recession, he decided to abandon civilization and decamp to the small Central American nation of Belize. There, “Colonel Kurtz-like,” he built a private paradise/fortress in the jungle, filled with “gas, sex and madness,” as the Hollywood Reporter described the project.
The movie will follow the Wired reporter who went to Belize to interview McAfee but eventually found himself sucked into McAfee’s world of “escalating paranoia, slippery reality, and murder,” the Reporter said.
At one point, McAfree’s private paradise had him rotating his attentions among five young mistresses, ages around 17 to 20, who occupied separate bungalows on his property.
McAfee eventually outstayed his welcome in Belize. with local police raiding his property because they suspected he was manufacturing methamphetamine. McAfee said the lab was for extracting compounds found in jungle plants to transform into possibly cutting-edge antibiotics and other mediations.
McAfee was never charged with drug manufacturing but his lab was shut down. Not long after, he was named a “person of interest” in the mysterious slaying of an American who lived part time as McAfee’s neighbor two doors down from his beachside compound.
McAfee denied the murder allegations but went into hiding anyway, and eventually returned to the United States, where he now lives in Tennessee and even tried a run for president as a Libertarian, coming in behind eventual presidential candidate Gary Johnson.
No doubt, the movie will focus on McAfee’s time in the jungle but he recently told ABC News that he’s looking to return to the spotlight.
He has a new company that invests in cybersecurity and he does paid speaking engagements, where some in the hacking world consider him to be a visionary, ABC said. Given the world’s obsession with hacking, the movie could give McAfee the platform he needs to expand his message.
“It’s an opportunity for me to speak again,” he said. “People are listening.”
