Johnny Depp talks pyjamas and Angelina Jolie

French singer Vanessa Paradis stole Johnny Depp's heart in an instant with a flash of her swanlike neck, the Hollywood star told Reuters in an interview.

Speaking before next week's premiere in Paris of his new movie “The Tourist,” where his character falls for a femme fatale played by Angelina Jolie, Depp said personal experience means he too believes in love at first sight.

“I certainly believe in an instant and profound connection with someone, which is what happened to me,” Depp said, wearing his trademark fedora hat.”

“I had an instant connection with Vanessa's back and neck ... I was fascinated with this neck and she turned, looked straight at me and wandered across the room and I thought: 'you're done, you're up **** creek.”'

Depp and Paradis, also a model and actress, have become one of Hollywood's favourite couples since they met in 1998. They have two children together and split their time between Paris, the south of France, New York and the Hollywood Hills.

In ‘The Tourist’, Depp plays a bumbling maths teacher swept off his feet by Jolie's glamorous Grace Kelly-esque character, who then drives him to madness by exposing him to crazy situations as he tries to prove his love.

In one scene, Depp finds himself bounding across the rooftops of Venice wearing a pair of pale blue pyjamas – unlikely garb for the 47-year-old heartthrob who admits he's not a fan of nightwear in real life.

“I have never been a pyjamas guy,” Depp chuckled.

“I rarely wear them, but when you do there's something that kind of takes you back to some weird psychological place, safety and comfort and being a kid maybe.”

Taking a break from his usual line of eccentric characters, the star of the "Pirates of the Caribbean" film franchise plays an everyday math teacher in "The Tourist," who gets embroiled in a web of deceit spun by Jolie's glamorous character.

For Depp, France gives his life a measure of simplicity which may have easily been taken away in Hollywood by his superstar status. "France is everything," he said, puffing on a roll-up cigarette. "It's afforded me the idea of a semi-normal life ... There's something magnetic (here), I don't know what it is."

Set in the backdrop of Paris and Venice, "The Tourist" brings Depp and Jolie together on the big screen for the first time. The pair had not previously met. Jolie, 35, admits that working with Depp has encouraged her to try a little harder to stretch herself as an actress. To illustrate her point, she said that while making "The Tourist" the actors discussed Maleficent, the wicked fairy godmother character in the film version of "Sleeping Beauty."

"I think before working with Johnny, I would have approached it a little more self-consciously, but having met him and watched his work, you get the sense you should try to have as much fun as possible," Jolie said.

The “Pirates of the Caribbean” star worked with the eccentric Tim Burton in the upcoming film “Dark Shadows” and for the future he has an eye on trying Shakespeare's Hamlet, something he said legendary actor Marlon Brando said he should do before he got too old.

But Depp would give it his own twist, he said, putting on a hint of an Irish accent. “It would be fun and interesting to do Hamlet on a small scale and take a different approach. I've asked dialect experts and they say at the time of Shakespeare it would have been closer to a Dublin accent,” he said.

“It's something I wouldn't mind tackling.”

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