Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd @ Entertainment Weekly

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: This Sweeney dude — he is messed up! You are going to freak out a lot of pre-pubescent girls with this character.
JOHNNY DEPP: Ah, finally! It's a radical left turn, that's for sure. The difficulty and the challenge [was] taking a character like that and attempting to make people feel for him, at the same time that he's slashing people up. Not easy. But I certainly hope it came across that way.

Musical lovers and Stephen Sondheim fanatics know Sweeney Todd really well. What about the general public?
Somebody sent me this thing from online. Somebody said, after they saw the trailer, ''I don't understand why in the middle of that trailer Depp broke into a song.'' Like, ''Whoa — What is he doing?''

Singers say Sondheim's melodies can be incredibly tough. Why?
It's real obtuse stuff. When you start to take those pieces apart, melody line by melody line, it's a lot of half-steps, which is not real easy to do. Kind of go G to A-flat to A to B-flat. It's super, ultra complicated, these notes that shouldn't work together at times. But he made them so.

Did Sondheim have any good advice for you?
He said to me early on, it was much more about the acting work than the singing. He felt the singing was secondary to hitting the notes emotionally. I didn't believe him. [Laughs] I think he was probably saying that to make me feel better about what I was about to attempt.

And what did that feel like?
Frightening. Really frightening! When Tim asked if I'd be into it, he said, ''Do you think you can sing?'' And I said, ''Honestly, I don't know.'' I'm not tone deaf, so I knew I could stay in key to some degree. But I didn't know if I could sustain a note, or belt one out.

You were in a number of rock and roll bands before you became an actor. Didn't you do any singing in those?
Virtually none. Just backup.

And yet Sondheim approved you without an audition.
Sondheim, bless him, had barely heard me talk. So when he said, ''He'll be fine,'' it was a real shock.

What did Tim Burton say to you after he finally heard your singing voice?
He couldn't have been sweeter about it. He was really supportive, and said he really liked it. It was the reaction I was praying for.

What's with Sweeney's big shock of white hair?
The idea was that he'd had this hideous trauma, from being sent away, locked away. That streak of white hair became the shock of that rage. It represented his rage over what had happened. It's certainly not the first time anyone's used it. But it's effective. It tells a story all by itself. My brother had a white spot growing up, and his son has this kind of shock of white in his hair.

 Were you conscious of what previous actors had done as Sweeney?
JOHNNY DEPP: Tim and I early on said, ''We've got one shot. I don't think we need to go where Len Cariou went or Michael Cerveris went. We should go somewhere else. This could be the punk-rock Sweeney, you know. The alternative Sweeney.''

So who did you look to for inspiration?
I'd say if there was someone hanging around the back of my mind, it had to have been Peter Lorre from Mad Love. He was kind of my ghost for it.

Why him, and why that movie?
He's unbelievably disturbing. Broken and haunting and sweet. Way ahead of its time, that film and performance. The other sort of God for me is Lon Chaney Sr. Aside from Peter Lorre, he would be the other enormous inspiration. Did you ever see his film The Penalty? It's shocking. He plays an amputee who's had his legs cut off at the knee. And he walks around on crutches. What he did was he trained himself to be able to pull his legs behind his back and fold them, and then harness them to his back and he could only stay like that for like 20 minutes at a time or something. It was already beyond Cirque du Soleil. His performance is so heightened and gorgeous. I highly recommend that one.

How messy was it filming Sweeney's really bloody scenes?
I remember everyone except me being covered in plastic trash bags. There'd be a countdown. Three, two, one...action! And then blammo, you know? The great deluge. The process we shot in called for a slightly over-the-top kind of color. They were going to desaturate it later, so they had to bring the color up on the set. It was kind of orangeish. A very unnatural-looking color.

What does all that fake blood smell and taste like?
It tasted kind of like a Karo-syrupy sort of thing. It was oily. And it was dangerous. Slippery. You'd see these big English grips, tiptoeing through the swamp of blood. Very surreal.

I HEART Johnny Depp!! 

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