Jerry Bruckheimer Reveals Disney’s Panic Over Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow in PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN

Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean is cemented as a Disney fan-favorite character. He brought humor to the adventurous film franchise, and fans will only entertain the idea of another film with his character front and center. But he wasn’t always the sure bet we know him as today.

Franchise producer Jerry Bruckheimer recently sat down with Deadline to talk about his most recent film, F1, and he was asked about the first time he pitched the Jack Sparrow character to Disney executives. He explained:

“It was interesting, but oh my God, what are we going to do here? That part was written for a Burt Lancaster. It wasn’t written with the humor. I said, ‘How are we going to get this past Disney?’ And then we had meetings with them, and he had all these gold teeth he wanted to put in.

“We finally convinced Johnny to take some of the gold teeth out, but they really didn’t know what he was going to do. And when the dailies came in, they said, ‘Oh my God, we got to switch actors. This is not going to work. Is he gay? Is he drunk? What is going on here?’

“So what we did is, we cut a sequence together and showed him off and why it worked. Once they saw that, they kind of went along with the ride for us, with us.”

It was a good gamble, obviously, and maybe we will see him back in the role one day.