Some actors’ careers fall apart once they get stuck playing the same roles over and over again, but while Johnny Depp tends to play similar characters pretty frequently, his case is different. He’s super famous, which means he gets to choose to play characters who are similar to each other, and also he has more than one kind of character he always plays. Sometimes he’s a pirate who swaggers around and does whatever he wants, and sometimes he’s an insane/drug-addled genius who swaggers around and does whatever he wants. And according to Deadline, he’ll be solidly in the latter mode for the upcoming film Richard Says Goodbye.
The movie is a comedy/drama from Katie Says Goodbye writer/director Wayne Roberts, and it’ll star Depp as a “world-weary college professor” who decides to “live his life as boldly and freely as possible” after receiving a “live-changing diagnosis.” Naturally, living boldly and freely means being a dick and doing a lot of drugs, with Deadline going on to say that the professor “binges through every vice” and embraces his “biting sense of humor” and “touch of madness.” Who knows, maybe he’ll even put on a bunch of scarves and start captaining a pirate ship.