Lily-Rose Depp says her The Idol pop star's life is 'very different' from growing up with dad Johnny Depp

Lily-Rose Depp wants The Idol viewers to know that her character Jocelyn is not based on her life growing up as Johnny Depp's daughter.

HBO and A24's drama — co-created by Abel "The Weeknd" Tesfaye, Reza Fahim, and Euphoria creator Sam Levinson — centers on Jocelyn, one of the most famous pop stars in the world looking to make a comeback after her career was derailed when she suffered a very public nervous breakdown triggered by her mother's death. Lily-Rose tells EW that her experiences growing up with a famous father and mother (she is the daughter of Johnny and French singer/actress/model Vanessa Paradis) are "very different" from Jocelyn's.

HBO Lily-Rose Depp, Abel Tesfaye

"The backstory that we thought about a lot for Jocelyn is that she's somebody who's been working basically since she could talk," Lily-Rose says. "She was a child actress, she had a mother who was really pushy in that way and really kind of bred her to be this trained performer, and that was her upbringing. That was certainly not mine."

She laughs before adding, "I mean, my parents definitely did their best to give my brother and I the most 'normal' childhood that we could have. Obviously, still not totally normal, but a sense of normalcy at least, and a sense of childhood and freedom and play and everything. So our childhoods are quite different. Of course, experiencing this industry from a young age, there's obviously pieces of that that help me understand maybe Jocelyn's perspective a little bit better, but still, definitely coming from different places."

In fact, Lily-Rose loved exploring the side of Jocelyn that she, as well as the rest of the world, can't begin to relate to, due to her extreme level of fame.

"There's something that my character says in one of the trailers, and you haven't seen this episode yet, but she says, 'There's nothing about me that's relatable,'" Lily-Rose says. "[I love] the self-awareness that she has, that she is not like everybody else, even though she's flesh and bone just like everybody else, her life does not resemble a lot of people's lives, and she is in a very particular position. The fact that she doesn't shy away from that says a lot about who she is as a person. I do feel like we are in a lot of ways in a culture of relatability, where it's like there's always a real sense of trying to be relatable in celebrity culture, and I don't think that Jocelyn plays into that."

The Idol's five-episode season airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/ PT on HBO and will be available to stream on Max.

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