People have long been asking when Johnny Depp will finally take home an Oscar. Johnny Depp, however, is not among them.
“I don’t want to win one of those things, ever, you know,” the actor told the BBC’s Newsbeat at the U.K. premiere of Scott Cooper’s Black Mass at the London Film Festival. “I don’t want to have to talk.”
Depp has been garnering critical praise and early Oscar buzz for his performance as legendary Boston gangster Whitey Bulger in Black Mass; EW’s Chris Nashawaty writes that the actor “plays the audience like Toscanini” in his B review.
Nevertheless, Black Mass is not an Oscar bid for the star. Depp has picked up three Best Actor nominations before, for his performances in Sweeney Todd, Finding Neverland, and the first Pirates of the Caribbean film. “They gave me one of those things, like a nomination, two or three times,” he said. “A nomination is plenty.”
“The idea of winning means that you’re in competition with someone, and I’m not in competition with anybody,” Depp expanded. “I just stick to my guns and do what I want to do. Sometimes people don’t like it, but that’s all right.”
In addition to “Oscar bait,” there’s another term Depp doesn’t want applied to his turn as Bulger: “comeback.”
“What did I come back from? The dead?” he said. “I haven’t done anything different in this than I have in any other film.” Not all would agree: Nashawaty also said of Depp in his review of Black Mass, “The actor’s really done his homework after playing hooky for what feels like too long.”
Head to Newsbeat for the full interview. Black Mass is in theaters now. The nominations for the 2016 Academy Awards will be announced on Jan. 14.
This article originally appeared on Entertainment Weekly.com
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