I’ve been somewhat wary of treating Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis’s 16-year-old daughter like a celebrity. She didn’t ask to be famous, and it feels ridiculous to treat a 16-year-old like she’s famous just because of her parents. But it’s like Willow and Jaden Smith – Lily-Rose Depp wants to be famous. She wants to be a star/celebrity/model/actor in her own right. She’s even regularly posing for magazine editorials these days too. This is Lily-Rose on the cover of the latest issue of Vanity Fair France. This follows an editorial she did with American VF a few months ago too. So, she wants you to pay attention, even if it’s because she has a shady 24-year-old boyfriend? Maybe. But mostly she just wants to be an actress/model.
Lily-Rose Depp isn’t your average 16-year-old. With a Chanel contract, a film selected for this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and 1.4 million (and growing) Instagram followers, the daughter of Johnny Depp and French star Vanessa Paradis has just added a Vanity Fair cover to her burgeoning résumé. Appearing in the latest issue of the glossy’s French edition, Depp says she’s plunged head-first into French cinema after tenuous steps in two Kevin Smith films
“For me, it’s simple: I like to act,” she tells the magazine. “It frees me. I want to make it my craft.”
Her immersion, she says, came with the territory: “I was backstage at my mother’s concerts; on [my father’s] films, as well as my mother’s. I loved the costumes and makeup. As a child I wanted to be a model or a singer.”
With two big movie roles (including one opposite Natalie Portman, Planetarium) filmed within the last few months, Depp isn’t wasting any time. Acting lessons, she concedes, “may come later.”
Her father, ever the protective but supportive parent, has said he was “quite worried” about her swift rise to fame – “especially not at this age.” But the budding actress, whom Planetarium director Rebeca Zlotowski raves is an “icon” in the making, seems keen on pursuing her passion. Noting that by her age, both her parents had already left school, Depp says with a laugh: “They were in no position to tell me, ‘Get your diploma first.’ ”
Still, she has had a chance to learn from her father firsthand: The actor had a small role in his daughter’s 2014 film Tusk. “It’s there that I really took a liking to filmmaking,” she says. “I loved getting under the character’s skin. I had fun. It vibrated inside me.”
“They were in no position to tell me, ‘Get your diploma first.’ “ OUCH! That’s always rough, when the kids realize that their parents have zero authenticity when it comes to life-advice or education-advice or whatever. Of course, both my parents had college degrees, and I was raised with the knowledge that NOT getting a college degree was not an option for me. But Lily-Rose isn’t even talking about college, she’s taking about high school, or whatever the French equivalent is of a high school diploma. And while she’s a rebellious, insouciant French-American girl with a certain je ne sais quoi, her parents CAN AND SHOULD tell her to get her high school diploma at the very least. And then take acting classes. And then date boys your own age. Basically, Vanessa and Johnny need to figure out a way to be parents.
Here are some photos of Lily-Rose and her 24-year-old boyfriend Ash last month.
Photos courtesy of Vanity Fair France, Fame/Flynet, WENN.
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