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I’ve been friends with Johnny Depp for a long time. I’m not even shitting you when I say this, I was an extra on 21 Jump Street when I was nineteen. I was a journalist, and I was sent there to do an interview with Johnny, which I couldn’t actually get to happen, so I made it up based on quotes from other interviews. Then we reconnected, I don’t know, when I was making Holy Wood, around then. I got a phone call about three in the morning saying, “Manson, you’ve got to come down to the Viper Room. Someone wants to meet you.”

I walked into the door, and it’s a small office. It’s way past closing time and Hunter S. Thompson says, “Lieutenant!” And I don’t know why he decided to call me “Lieutenant.” I don’t really know what the rankings were for what army we were dealing with, but he was full blown Hunter. So he then went on to tell Johnny that I was the only person he feared — which made me feel great. And we became close friends in a weird way. He would call me from Denver at five in the morning. He would say, “Marilyn. Manson. Brian. Shit-eye.” “Did you just call me ‘Shit-eye?’ What does that mean?”

After the Michael Moore interview, I had to go on stage, and I wasn’t really afraid, I was just getting so much stress from everyone I knew. So I was calling him to see if I could see him. He was like, “No, I’m not coming there. No way! You should just get in a car and come where I’m at. I’ve got a tank on the front lawn.” That’s the kind of guy he was. He was the worst possible father figure in the best way. So there was a bond that grew.

I hadn’t seen Johnny in four years because we simply got out of touch, because I didn’t realize his email was the same, and I changed mine. That was the only reason. We both laughed about it because we’re completely oblivious to modern technology sometimes, him, more so than me nowadays, because I’m trying my best.

[We reconnected] when Damien Echols was getting released, and we were both very as involved as possible with that. But I tried to keep my involvement at a distance because he was literally, pretty much put in jail for being someone like me, not for doing a crime. So I thought it really wouldn’t help if I backed him publicly. And it hurt me that I couldn’t because of course I want to pick up the banner for the underdog and the person being wrongfully blamed for something. Who more could I associate with?

When he got out, I had spoken to him on the phone. He was in jail before cell phones, so it was a weird thing for him. But he’s so much like me and so much like Johnny. We sat in a room, the three of us, and we were telling stories and he had no complaints. He said, “Obviously, I can’t compare to what you guys have been through.”

Johnny and I looked at each other and I said, “Are you fucking kidding? You were in prison.” He didn’t understand it but his innocent, not naive, childlike outlook on life is exactly what he shares with me and Johnny. If you think about it, you have the world’s most famous movie star, and he happens to be a friend of mine, and I still look at him as the world’s most famous movie star, and we did a song together, and afterward, he said, “Man, it’s so cool to do a song with Marilyn Manson!” I said, “Shut the fuck up! What’s cooler is doing a song with Johnny Depp? You fucking asshole.”

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