Get ready for Johnny Depp and Johnny Heard — the sequel
Johnny Depp has lost his libel case against The Sun, but the saga of the fallout from his marriage to Amber Heard is far from over as they fight to save their careers.
So advantage Amber Heard. After some of the most hypnotically grim testimony to have echoed around Britain’s High Court in its 145-year history — a tale of violence, jealousy, flying bottles, oceans of booze, mountains of drugs and soiled bedsheets — Johnny Depp has lost his libel case against The Sun newspaper.
The judge decided that there was enough evidence to support the newspaper’s claim that Depp had beaten his former wife Heard, an American actress, after a trial that captured the public imagination far more powerfully than any of his recent movies.
How many of you can remember Depp playing a photographer in Minamata or an army colonel in Waiting for the Barbarians? Far fewer, I’ll bet, than were morbidly fascinated during those three weeks in July when one of the biggest stars in the world and his former wife aired their dirty laundry in public. Literally in one case.
Heard, 34, had claimed that Depp, 57, would turn into a jealous “monster” after bingeing on drugs and alcohol, detailing 14 times when he choked, punched, slapped, head-butted, throttled and kicked her. She described one of those occasions as a “three-day hostage situation”.
The court was played a recording in which Depp says to Heard: “I headbutted you in the f..king ... forehead. That doesn’t break a nose.”
Horrific stuff. Heard didn’t emerge well, either. Depp alleged he had lost the tip of a finger after she threw a vodka bottle at him (the judge ruled that she wasn’t responsible for the injury). He also claimed she had left excrement in their marital bed — again, the judge did not find that Heard was responsible.
Even so, Depp really is in the shit now. The tag of wife beater is a hard one to shed. Just look at the number of reactions to Sean Connery’s death that mentioned his spousal abuse.
The verdict will be hailed as a victory by victims of domestic violence, and by the press too.
Perhaps the most lurid allegation to emerge during the trial — and that really is a ferociously competitive field — was Heard’s claim that Depp had threatened to cut off the penis of Elon Musk, the Tesla billionaire whom he suspected of having an affair with Heard (she and Musk both deny this).
Whatever you think of Depp — or Musk for that matter — we should at least be grateful that he didn’t go through with that.
Let’s remember, though, that this is only part one. Despite spending an estimated £5m ($9.1m) on the case so far, Depp is highly likely to appeal against this verdict.
“The man’s not stupid,” Helena Bonham Carter, who starred with him in several films including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, told the Guardian. “He wouldn’t have gone to this length if he thought he was in the wrong.”
Depp and Heard’s legal teams are also gearing up for an even bigger case in America, where he is suing her and The Washington Post for $US50m ($71m) over a column she wrote in the newspaper, claiming that it’s based on the premise that he “perpetuated domestic violence against her”. She is countersuing, alleging Depp and his lawyer deployed Twitter trolls and Russian bots to smear her.
The burden of proof will be more on Depp in the American trial — defamation laws there favour free speech — and this time there will be a jury, adding another variable.
Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, Heard’s American lawyer, said ominously: “Very soon we will be presenting even more voluminous evidence in the US.”
Depp v Heard II: this time it’s even more personal. It’s hard to think how it will be, though. We’ve already heard Depp claim he had lost his £600m fortune and was millions in debt. Then Heard alleged that he had created nicknames for those of her co-stars he considered a sexual threat. Leonardo DiCaprio became “Pumpkin-head”, Channing Tatum was “Potato-head” and he had presumably run out of vegetables when he dubbed Jim Sturgess “Jim Turd Sturgess”.
He also sent a “joke” text to his friend the British actor Paul Bettany about drowning and burning Heard then “f..king Heard’s burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she’s dead”.
Other actors whom Depp allegedly believed had pursued Heard included Eddie Redmayne, James Franco, Liam Hemsworth, Billy Bob Thornton and Kevin Costner. If you’re worried about your wife running off with the pensionable star of Field of Dreams, then your paranoia levels really are world class.
So what next for this turbulent pair, who met while filming The Rum Diary in 2011, married in 2015 and divorced in 2017?
“Friends and advisers told me I would never again work as an actress — that I would be blacklisted,” Heard wrote in The Washington Post. “A movie I was attached to recast my role. I had just shot a two-year campaign as the face of a global fashion brand, and the company dropped me. Questions arose as to whether I would be able to keep my role of Mera in the movies Justice League and Aquaman.”
It looks like she will — she’s scheduled to reprise her role of the telepathic undersea princess, in Aquaman 2 and the next Justice League movie. Heard, who has been photographed in London with her girlfriend, Bianca Butti, a cinematographer and actress, also has a role in an apocalyptic drama called The Stand. That imagines a world “in ruins due to a man-made plague” where “a battle of biblical proportions ensues”. Which should be child’s play after taking on Depp in court.
His career is a bigger beast, for him and his hangers-on. His films have made more than $US10bn. In her piece for The Washington Post Heard compared Depp to the Titanic. When the ship “strikes an iceberg there are a lot of people on board desperate to patch up holes”, she wrote. “Not because they believe in or even care about the ship, but because their own fates depend on the enterprise.”
His continued participation in the Pirates of the Caribbean series looks unlikely. Jerry Bruckheimer, the producer of the franchise, said this year he was “not quite sure what Johnny’s role is going to be”.
Whether or not Depp wins the appeal and the American case, his “wings will be clipped”, said Mark Stephens, a media law partner at the London firm Howard Kennedy.
The actor admitted during the trial that he took what Stephens referred to as “industrial quantities” of Class-A substances, and supplied Lily-Rose, one of his two children from a previous relationship with Vanessa Paradis, with cannabis when she was 13.
“It’s insulting to say that I spent $US30,000 on wine (each month) ... because it was far more,” Depp joshed after claims during the trial about his drinking.
The court was shown a picture taken by Heard featuring his weapons of choice: a pint of whisky, four lines of cocaine and a large “pill box” adorned with a skull and crossbones. The picture was taken at 1.37pm.
Such revelations could be problematic. Stephens said that “even though (Depp) has no convictions for drug abuse, the authorities in some countries could ban him from entry on the basis of his court evidence. He claims to be a reformed drug-taker, but they might not believe that”.
Yet Depp’s success has been built on bringing subversive danger into the mainstream, from his exquisite freak in Edward Scissorhands to his swaggering undercover FBI agent in Donnie Brasco and his most successful role, Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
The man who once claimed to have had sex with Kate Moss in every room of the Chateau Marmont has recently been linked with Sophie Hermann, a 33-year-old British star of Made in Chelsea.
His excesses, though, are entry-level stuff for Keith Richards, who played Sparrow’s dad in one of those films, and Alice Cooper and Joe Perry, Depp’s bandmates in the Hollywood Vampires supergroup. By 1.37pm they would have guzzled everything.
Perhaps music is where Depp’s future lies. Record companies can be less jumpy than Hollywood studios about tarnished reputations. Chris Brown has shifted plenty of units since he beat up Rihanna, while Michael Jackson has certainly not vanished from playlists, despite compelling evidence that he committed far worse crimes than Depp.
Still, it’s by no means certain that Depp’s movie career will hit the skids. Hollywood loves a comeback and plenty of his peers have had second acts to their lives after brushes with the law: Rob Lowe (sex tape with a 16-year-old girl), Robert Downey Jr (drugs and eventual prison time) and Depp’s former girlfriend Winona Ryder (drugs and theft).
He still has plenty of supporters in the industry, from Bonham Carter to JK Rowling, whose powerful agent, Neil Blair, was present in London for the verdict.
As things stand Depp will reprise his role as the dark wizard Grindelwald in the third Fantastic Beasts movie, although that will put the staunchly feminist Rowling, the film’s creator and co-writer, in a difficult position.
In a recent Times interview Mark Rylance described Depp as “a very loving, and very sensitive and very trustworthy person”, adding: “Johnny Depp is no wife beater.”
The High Court would beg to differ. It’s unsurprising that Depp is now keen for us to see his softer, more reflective side. He is voicing a cute seabird in an animated film called Puffins and has been writing a memoir on an old-fashioned typewriter. “I poured myself a vodka in the morning and started writing until the tears filled my eyes and I couldn’t see the page any more,” he said last year.
Perhaps most tellingly, though, his production company has bought the rights to The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman, a novel by Bruce Robinson, the writer and director of Withnail and I. The main character of the book is a man who is prone to violent rages.
The Times
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