Johnny Depp has opened up about his high-profile marriage to Amber Heard and how he believes the #MeToo movement impacted his career.
The Pirates of the Caribbean, 62, star believes he was a ‘crash test dummy’ for MeToo, which is a social movement against sexual violence and sexual assault, advocating for women specifically to speak out.
Depp was married to the Aquaman actress, 39, between 2015 and 2017. When she filed for divorce, Heard accused him of domestic violence, which led to him being dropped by Disney after 14 years playing Captain Jack Sparrow.
The fallout involved two trials. In the first, Depp took action against The Sun for referring to him as a ‘wife-beater’, with his 2018 libel suit making it to court in summer 2020 and ending with the court deeming the characterisation to be ‘substantially true’.
A further legal battle followed when he successfully sued Heard over an article she wrote for The Washington Post, in which she shared her experiences as a survivor of domestic abuse. Depp’s lawyers said this falsely accused the actor himself of being an abuser.
To say the trial was big news would be an understatement, with proceedings streamed live to 3.5million viewers and fans waiting outside court in droves.
In the end, the jury ruled Heard did defame Depp, but Depp also defamed Heard while fighting against her abuse charges.
At the time, Heard said the verdict had ‘set back the clock to a time when a woman who spoke up and spoke out could be publicly shamed and humiliated’.
Now, Depp, who claimed Heard was the one who violently abused him, has spoken to The Sunday Times about the public mudslinging and unsettling details of his marriage the public became privy to.
‘Look, it had gone far enough,’ he replied firmly.
‘I knew I’d have to semi-eviscerate myself. Everyone was saying, “It’ll go away!” But I can’t trust that. What will go away? The fiction pawned around the f***ing globe? No, it won’t.
‘If I don’t try to represent the truth, it will be like I’ve actually committed the acts I am accused of. And my kids will have to live with it. Their kids. Kids that I’ve met in hospitals.
‘So the night before the trial in Virginia, I didn’t feel nervous. If you don’t have to memorise lines, if you’re just speaking the truth? Roll the dice.’
Raising his voice and becoming agitated, he acknowledged that ‘none of this was going to be easy’.
‘But I didn’t care,’ he declared.
‘I thought, “I’ll fight until the bitter f***ing end.” And if I end up pumping gas? That’s alright. I’ve done that before.’
The interviewer probed Depp about the reaction to his and Heard’s case, given that someone he had been in love with received much less support and more scrutiny.
‘Well, that is the thing,’ he began in reply. ‘That I had been in love with.’ That’s where we could start, to look at the roots of “in love with”.’
Reflecting on his childhood, he detailed: ‘Because with regards to how I was raised, I wouldn’t say it was a house without love, but it was an intense love, and I would not say that myself, or my siblings, or my pop and mom, experienced any great love or bliss.’
Depp has said he did not live in a happy home, as there were ‘many episodes of conflict’.
‘So, what were my initial dealings with what we call “love”? Clearly obtuse.
‘And what that means is, if you’re a sucker like I am, sometimes you look in a person’s eye and see some sadness, some lonely thing, and you feel you can help that person.’
While Depp insists he has ‘no regrets about anything’ in life, he admits feeling ‘hurt’ when people whom he trusted did not ‘stand up’ for him during his trials, accusing them of doing him ‘dirty’.
The Willy Wonka actor noted that he is ‘weird’, but that his ‘loyalty is the last thing anybody could question’.
On his involvement in the #MeToo era, Depp said: ‘I was pre-MeToo. I was like a crash test dummy for MeToo. It was before Harvey Weinstein.
‘And I sponged it, took it all in. And so I wanted, from the hundreds of people I’ve met in that industry, to see who was playing it safe.’
‘Better go woke!’, he hissed.
After being ruled to be a victim of defamation, Depp was awarded approximately $15million (£12m) in damages.
Heard, who announced in May that she had welcomed twin babies, was awarded $2m (£1.5m) in compensatory damages.
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