LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Johnny Depp is great around children. There have been umpteen stories about the actor using his 'Pirates' costume to lift the spirits of young children at hospitals. In fact, the actor once revealed how he prepared himself to play Captain Jack Sparrow in the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' movie franchise. He took inspiration from his children, and while talking about it, he said, "I started out secretly testing characters on [my kids] to see how their reactions would be. With my daughter, we’d be playing Barbies and I’d try out these voices on her and she’d just say 'stop.'" He knew his character was a hit because his children 'did not fire him'.

This is just one backstory; now we have come across another heartwarming story related to the actor being the best with children. Christina Ricci once told E! News how she got an important life lesson from Depp. She was only aged 9 and inquisitiveness had gotten the best of her. It's a tale from 1989 when Ricci and Winona Ryder, who was Depp's girlfriend at the time, were shooting for 'Mermaids'. Ricci recalled witnessing a possibly anti-gay confrontation between two other people on set and wanted to know more about it. Here's how that went.

'She put me on the phone with Johnny'

"Johnny is actually the person who explained to me what homosexuality was when I was 9," Ricci just said on SiriusXM's 'Andy Cohen Live'. "There was something going on on-set and someone was not being nice to someone else. And they were like, 'Oh, well he might be homophobic.' And then I was like, 'Well, I don't understand what that is.'" The 'Yellowjackets' star added, "I was in Winona's trailer and...she put me on the phone with Johnny. And Johnny explained it to me."

Ricci claimed Depp defined homosexuality in "the simplest terms." The 42-year-old recounted, "He was like, 'It's when a man wants to have sex with a man and when a woman wants to have sex with a woman. I was like, 'Ah okay.'"

Cohen noted that the actress may have inquired about the idea from a different 'Mermaids' co-star during the interview. He made a joke about Cher, the movie's lead actress, saying, "I mean, you've got her in the next trailer." "I know, we should've run right over there," said Ricci who would go on to co-star in several films with Depp, including 'Fear and Loathing' in Las Vegas in 1998, 'Sleepy Hollow' in 1999, and 'The Man Who Cried' in 2000.