Johnny Depp has led the billion-dollar Pirates of the Caribbean franchise for Disney for almost 20 years. However, after losing his libel case in the UK courts, his future as Captain Jack Sparrow has been a lot less certain. Nevertheless, the 58-year-old continues to receive support for a return as the swashbuckler from some of his co-stars.
One of them is Mr Gibbs actor Kevin McNally, who has played Captain Jack’s first mate across all five Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
While promoting his new movie Decrypted, the 65-year-old told Express.co.uk in an exclusive interview: “Definitely.
“I’ve never seen a hint of any dark side to Johnny. I see a great humanitarian and a beautiful human being.
“I don’t see any impediment for him coming back and playing Jack Sparrow.”
READ MORE: Johnny Depp hits out at Disney: ‘You can’t take Jack Sparrow away’
While he backs Depp’s return, the Mr Gibbs star is open to his character and Captain Jack playing a different role if spin-offs are made in the meantime.
McNally continued: “I think there was a general feeling that without Jack there is no Pirates franchise. And there’s probably a lot of truth in that.
“But now there have been questions about that, certainly why not have other Pirate films and certainly then why not have Jack back or Jack playing a different part.
“I mean I was musing about this the other day and you can easily think of stories in which maybe somebody is looking for Jack and come to Mr Gibbs and say, ‘How would I find Jack?’”
McNally shared: “It was a day for me doing all those wonderful mad crazy scenes.
“It was my only feature film of last year apart from an animated feature and so I was very grateful for that because I think everybody’s worry and reality in lockdown was there would be this massive enforced hiatus on their work.
“Like most actors I don’t cope with boredom very well! Having been used to a 50-year career of going from one project to another, I was sort of really worried that Covid would interrupt that.”
While wanting to obey the rules and keep people safe, the star was very pleased to find filmmakers who were able to shoot a movie within the pandemic world requirements.
The new film’s synopsis reads: “When an extremely mismatched team of National Security Agency operatives take on a covert mission to kidnap the creator of Bitcoin – Satoshi Nakamoto – to extract, by any means necessary, the information they need to destroy cryptocurrencies, things go wildly wayward in this raucous romp.
“The botched NSA interrogation forces together a homophobic field agent, a feminist technical adviser, a transgender asylum seeker, a crypto-anarchist, a racist Brexiteer and an inclusionist MI5 agent.
“Of course, sparks start to fly when their opposing beliefs clash in a major way. But a truth drug reveals a newfound honesty with riotous consequences…”
Decrypted is available on digital download now.