Lily-Rose Depp wants to clarify for ‘The Idol’ audience that her role as Jocelyn doesn’t reflect her personal experiences growing up as the daughter of Johnny Depp.
The drama series ‘The Idol’ is a collaboration between HBO and A24. It was created jointly by Abel ‘The Weeknd’ Tesfaye, Reza Fahim, and Sam Levinson, the creator of Euphoria.
The series revolves around Jocelyn, a globally renowned pop star striving to rebuild her career after a highly publicized emotional breakdown following her mother’s death.
Speaking to EW Magazine, Lily-Rose emphasizes that her life growing up with celebrity parents, Johnny Depp and French performer Vanessa Paradis, is “very different” from the life of her character, Jocelyn.
“The backstory that we thought about a lot for Jocelyn is that she’s somebody who’s been working basically since she could talk,” shares Lily-Rose.
“She was a child actress, she had a mother who was really pushy in that way and really kind of bred her to be this trained performer, and that was her upbringing. That was certainly not mine.”
She chuckles and adds, “I mean, my parents definitely did their best to give my brother and I the most ‘normal’ childhood that we could have.”
“Obviously, still not totally normal, but a sense of normalcy at least, and a sense of childhood and freedom and play and everything.”
“So our childhoods are quite different. Of course, experiencing this industry from a young age, there’s obviously pieces of that help me understand maybe Jocelyn’s perspective a little bit better, but still, definitely coming from different places,” she reveals.
Indeed, Lily-Rose loved the opportunity to delve into aspects of Jocelyn’s character that she, along with the majority of people, found unrelatable, given Jocelyn’s extraordinary level of celebrity.
“There’s something that my character says in one of the trailers, and you haven’t seen this episode yet, but she says, ‘There’s nothing about me that’s relatable,'” Lily Rose recounts.
“[I love] the self-awareness that she has, that she is not like everybody else, even though she’s flesh and bone just like everybody else, her life does not resemble a lot of people’s lives, and she is in a very particular position.”
“The fact that she doesn’t shy away from that says a lot about who she is as a person,” she goes on to explain.
“I do feel like we are in a lot of ways in a culture of relatability, where it’s like there’s always a real sense of trying to be relatable in celebrity culture, and I don’t think that Jocelyn plays into that,” Lily Rose expresses.
‘The Idol’, consisting of five episodes per season, is broadcasted at 9 p.m. ET/ PT every Sunday on HBO and will be available for streaming on Max.
