The weirdest thing you'll see today: Johnny Depp rocking out in a Japanese beer commercial

Anyone who’s seen Sofia Coppola’s Oscar-nominated 2003 drama ‘Lost in Translation’ will remember that it presented Bill Murray as an ageing Hollywood actor struggling to maintain his earlier success, whose mid-life crisis is explored via his visit to Japan to shoot a whiskey commercial.

As such, seeing Johnny Depp in 2017 in a commercial for Japanese beer Asahi… well, it’s hard not to make certain assumptions.

And this is before we even get to how odd the commercial itself is. Take a look for yourself in the embedded clip below.

Trading heavily on the 53-year old actor’s rock’n’roll image, we see Depp on a rooftop alongside Japanese musician and actor Masaharu Fukuyama. The pair of them rock out on their guitars whilst an eagle watches, then – just to make it that bit more epic – a helicopter swoops past.

Then they each crack open a can of Asahi, and if you closely at the end Depp can be heard uttering a single line: “respect, brother.”

Okay, as TV commercials go it probably isn’t the strangest we’ve ever seen, but it does seem a pretty random thing for Depp to be doing at this point, in the same year that he revisits his signature role of Captain Jack Sparrow in ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge.’

The state of Depp’s finances has been the subject of much speculation in recent months, with reports of excessive spending burning through his fortune amassed largely from the ‘Pirates’ movies. He has also become a controversial figure following allegations of domestic violence from ex-wife Amber Heard.

Even so, Depp’s acting career isn’t looking too shabby at present. ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge’ has made over $510 million worldwide to date, and later this year he joins an all-star cast in ‘Murder on the Orient Express.’

Depp’s also set to play the Invisible Man as part of Universal’s Dark Universe, and will reprise the role of Grindelwald in the planed sequels to ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.’

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