Two of the first three movies Johnny Depp ever starred in came in Wes Craven’s influential horror classic A Nightmare on Elm Street and Oliver Stone’s ‘Best Picture’-winning war drama Platoon, but the breakthrough role of his career didn’t even come on the big screen.

Instead, the actor became an overnight heartthrob as Tom Hanson in the hit police procedural 21 Jump Street, where he played one of the lead roles across four seasons and 40 episodes. An easily digestible and marketable series, the concept follows fresh-faced police officers going undercover as high school students to investigate illicit goings-on.

It’s undeniably silly – something that was proven true in the most hilarious of fashions when Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill headlined the comedic feature-length reboot that turned the entire conceit into a goldmine for humour – but Depp’s frustrations weren’t entirely derived from being a pivotal cog in a preposterous machine.

Instead, the longer 21 Jump Street went on, the more he began to resent his status as a teen idol. Although he was aware the show served as the platform to get his career off the ground and up and running, he ended up growing so disenfranchised that he left at the end of its penultimate fourth season.

Less than two months after the Depp-less fifth run of 21 Jump Street premiered, the actor’s first partnership with Tim Burton on Edward Scissorhands hit cinemas, where it would go on to become an instant cult favourite, recoup its production budget four times over at the box office, and earn the leading man a Golden Globe nomination in the ‘Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy’ category. Just like that, his decision to vacate his star-making part was entirely justified.

Now focused entirely on his silver screen prospects, even before Edward Scissorhands had released, Depp couldn’t have been clearer to the Los Angeles Times when he was gauged on a potential return to television. “Never, I’d rather pump gas,” he said. “I would never do it again, ever. There’s not enough money in Los Angeles.”

He did make a point of saying he didn’t “want to bite the hand that feeds me or anything like that,” and he was grateful to 21 Jump Street for raising his profile. However, when he boiled down his importance to the show to its essence, he branded himself as nothing more than a “puppet”. His disdain for the very thing that made him a household name was there for all to see, but he did mend that particular fence eventually. Well, sort of.

In Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s 21 Jump Street film, Depp reprised the role of Hanson for an uncredited cameo alongside former co-star Peter DeLuise, bringing things full circle and drawing a definitive line under his association with the cops-and-criminals thriller that first placed him in the spotlight, before quickly convincing him he belonged somewhere else entirely.