Depp plays a patsy to Jolie’s seductress. The actor’s partner, Vanessa Paradis, was furious that the film’s first draft included a (literally) steamy shower scene. (
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Jolie and Pitt had the entrance to their 500-year-old palazzo draped for additional privacy. (PacificCoastNews.com)
Whatever Angelina Jolie has got going on under her clothes must be among the four most powerful forces on earth, right after gravity, an atom bomb and Oprah. She’s so powerful, her discarded undergarments have to be buried in a Nevada mountain repository. Her lips are registered as deadly weapons.
Jolie’s hold over men is legendary — but could that hold be extended to an even bigger star than Brad Pitt?
Seems so.
While starring together in their new movie, Friday’s “The Tourist,” Jolie and Johnny Depp had to take great pains to not actually appear together.
The two stars reportedly feared even having a casual chat on the Venice, Italy, set, lest some pesky photographer snap their picture and rumors begin burning through the tabloids. After all, this is the woman who snatched Pitt right out from under Jennifer Aniston’s nose on the set of “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” like a cartoon bear filching a pie off a windowsill.
Depp told Vanity Fair that it was annoying “not even being able to talk to each other in public because someone will take a photograph and it will be misconstrued and turned into some other s – – -.”
To combat the lensmen, producers shuttled the actors around town in water taxis with the windows blacked out, stationed an army of bodyguards around the set and even enlisted Venetian police to block off canals so that their stars could shoot scenes — and simply go out for a bite to eat — in seclusion.
And to make sure there were no rumors of nighttime flirtations in the hotel hallways, the two actors stayed in different places.
Jolie and Pitt, her partner of five years, spent almost three months in Venice with their six children in a top-floor apartment in the magnificent 500-year-old Palazzo Mocenigo. Heavy curtains blacked out all the windows, and security was beefed up. Locals quickly renamed it “Palazzo Pitt.”
“They had their own catering staff with them from America, and the whole building was locked down with security — the pontoon outside for the boats had a gazebo around it and all the windows were covered,” says local grocery store owner Paolo De Rossi, who delivered bread, cheese and liquor to the house.
Depp chose to stay in the stylishly upmarket Palazzina Grassi hotel, which had just opened when he checked in. He was immediately given a block of 10 rooms, including one that was turned into a gym and another that became a music room with guitars and amps.
Though he was frequently seen playing video games with his
bodyguard, Depp also took over the hotel lounge one night after shooting had finished.
“One night he came in from filming and started mixing the records in the bar, and everyone was having a great time. He was really enjoying himself, and he was fixing cocktails behind the bar and making espresso,” a hotel insider says.
Meanwhile, the precautions taken to keep Depp and Jolie separate were evidently not enough to satisfy Depp’s longtime partner and mother of his two children, Vanessa Paradis. She had no interest in becoming the next Laura Dern, who lost fiance Billy Bob Thornton to Jolie after the two worked on “Pushing Tin” together.
Paradis and the kids stayed at the Depp compound in the south of France, 90 minutes away by private jet, and the actor shuttled back and forth on weekends. But she was rumored to be so worried about Jolie that she considered relocating to Venice for the shoot.
Paradis was said to be especially distraught about a steamy scene in which her man and Jolie get it on in the shower.
In the scene in the question, the script reportedly reads, “Walking in, he lifts [Jolie’s character] against the glass, clutching at her slithery body, kissing her frantically. She kisses him back with ardor, w=rapping her dripping legs around his back.”
A source tattled to the UK’s Daily Mail that after learning about the scene, Paradis pressured Depp not to do the movie. When he resisted, she later demanded that he not do the scene, and he reportedly agreed.
“[Depp] told the producers it cheapened the movie and I am assured that his wishes are being honored,” the source said.
(A Sony spokesperson says he is unaware of any romantic scenes being axed from the film.)
Maybe Paradis wasn’t being overly cautious. “Tourist” director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has said that Jolie and Depp had “incredible chemistry,” and those who saw them together agree.
The two share a passionate kiss on a hotel balcony, which was described as “very hot.”
“The atmosphere when Angelina and Johnny filmed the sex scenes was really electric,” one set insider tells The Post. “They really gelled well and it was a great scene, really passionate.”
In the $100-million film, Depp plays Frank Tupelo, an American math teacher who travels to Venice to get over a failed relationship. While on a train, he meets Jolie’s Elise Clifton-Ward, an Interpol agent. Frank soon becomes her pawn in a mission to track down a criminal.
“The Tourist” marks not only the first time Depp and Jolie have appeared on-screen together, but the first time they’ve ever met — even though they have homes an hour apart in France.
“We’re both locked away,” Jolie told Entertainment Weekly. (Yeah? Tell that to Billy Bob Thornton and Pitt’s exes.)
The first meeting came in February at an LA office. Jolie admitted that she was nervous, although things quickly warmed up.
“I knew who she was a but I didn’t know what to expect,” Depp told EW. “We sat there and babbled about our kids, and it was a huge relief. I was pleasantly surprised that she has an incredibly perverse sense of humor. She’s a really cool broad.”
The two are friends, and disappointingly enough for newspaper sales, nothing more. But that doesn’t mean Depp left the shoot empty-handed. He did exit Venice with a new lady he picked up at Hotel Grassi.
Depp was so pleased with the service from 38-year-old staffer Alice Ledda that he offered her a job as his assistant.
“Johnny was delighted with Alice because she helped everything run so smoothly for him when he was here,” hotel employee Chiara Serra tells The Post. “She would organize everything day to day, make arrangements for dinner and send out for anything he wanted.
“She speaks perfect English and she met the rest of the family when they came over, and they all got on really well.”
But not too well. Wouldn’t want to start rumors or anything.
With Larry Getlen and Reed Tucker