In two months’ time, actor Johnny Depp and his ex-wife, Hollywood actress, Amber Heard will go before Judge Penney Azcarate to contest the multi-million dollar lawsuit instigated by Depp over Heard’s 2018 OpEd in The Washington Post.
In a recent speech in Serbia, the Pirates of the Caribbean star made bold statements regarding his future, hoping to start his “re-beginning”.
After gaining worldwide recognition in the Walt Disney Company’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003) as Captain Jack Sparrow, Johnny Depp became one of the entertainment’s most profitable stars.
Now, the actor’s position in the industry is a far cry from his jaunty days as Sparrow. After a slew of allegations of domestic violence and abuse in his relationship with Amber Heard, whom he first met on the set of The Rum Diary (2011), Depp has been ousted from his blockbuster franchises. The Kentucky-born actor will no longer appear as Jack Sparrow in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean series; he has been replaced with Academy Award-nominee, Margot Robbie (The Suicide Squad) for the upcoming sixth installment in the swash-buckling franchise.
Likewise, following his loss of the libel trial at the London court, Warner Bros. asked Depp to resign from his role as Gellert Grindelwald in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter spinoff movies, the Fantastic Beasts franchise. He was slated to appear in this year’s Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore (2022), but Mads Mikkelsen (Hannibal) will take over playing the dark wizard.
Justice Andrew Nicol chose to rule in favor of British tabloid, The Sun, Dan Wootton, and The Sun‘s parent company, News Group Newspapers for the libel case (The Sun published that Depp was a “wife-beater”), despite support from Depp’s ex-partners Vanessa Paradis and Winona Ryder. However, in contrast, Judge Penney Azcarate has repeatedly warded off Heard’s attempts to have the defamation suit thrown out of court.
One of Heard’s claims relied on the ruling at the London courts — which found many of the domestic abuse allegations “substantially true”–, and her ex-husband’s appeal failure, but Azcarate reminded the Aquaman (2018) star’s team that, in this case, territories matter and the London court was for an entirely different part of the ex-couples multitude of litigation.
The Washington Post
