Lily-Rose Depp doesn’t care if people want to see her fail because she’s out to “prove people wrong.”
The actress, the daughter of actor-musician Johnny Depp and French model-actress-singer Vanessa Paradis, recently opened up to Vanity Fair about working to find her own identity in Hollywood, despite critics.
“I feel like people have been ready to see me fail, in a way, since I was a kid,” she says. “That has made me only want to work harder and prove people wrong. Not in a vindictive way at all, but just in a sense of, like, fuel to my fire. I do want to prove that I’m a hard worker and I’m not here for anything else but to work hard. But Rob [Eggers, Nosferatu director] was one of my bucket list directors. I didn’t think I would get to work with him so soon, so early in my career.”
The Idol star added that she’s used to the constant pressure as “it’s been my life” having “come from a family of artists.”
“Both of my parents are these incredible artists and I have grown up with that,” Depp explained. “Respecting them both so much and what they do, and trying to find my own identity in this world, has been interesting when everybody’s thinking that you’re here for the wrong reasons or that you don’t deserve to be here. You either can sit there and cry about it and be like, ‘This isn’t fair!’ or you can be like, ‘Okay, I’m just going to work really, really hard and do the best that I can.'”
She emphasized that she loves acting, so “if people still want to talk shit or see me in a certain way, then that’s not my problem.”
Ahead of the release of Nosferatu on Dec. 25, which sees Depp play Ellen Hutter opposite Bill Skarsgård’s iconic vampire, the actress also told the magazine that the hardest part of the role was “getting over the imposter syndrome of, like, ‘Why am I here and why do these people think that I can do this?’”
“Getting to a place where I felt confident enough within myself to be like, ‘I can do this and I am here for a reason,’ I definitely have struggled with that,” Depp continued. “Humility is incredibly important, especially in this business. In a way, I always want to feel like I’m just starting out and like I still have so much to learn — which is how I do feel.”