nov 12, 2015 - MARIE CLAIRE You Don't Know the Real Amber Heard Interview USA

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The December 2015 issue first made available on-line 12 November.

You Don't Know the Real Amber Heard—But You're About To

Marie Claire's December cover star on love, life on the run, and her Texas-sized ambition.

Amber Heard's mother likes to say that ever since Amber was a little girl, she's been trying to see how far she can get, how fast. "A horse became a bike, a bike became a car, a car became a plane," Heard explains. And now, when I ask her if she likes flying, she looks puzzled. "It's like walking, I guess," she says. "It's just how I get around."

She's certainly picked up speed since she left Texas for Hollywood 13 years ago, landing, among other things, the perfectly descriptive title role in All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006), a part as Demi Moore's daughter in The Joneses (2009), and a life-altering costar in Johnny Depp, with whom she lit up The Rum Diary (2011). Much was made of this union in the tabloids, as they remarked on the age gap (Depp is 52; Heard is 29) and the timing (the end of Depp's 14-year relationship with the French singer and actress Vanessa Paradis was announced in June 2012). Heard and Depp were married last February, sparking more or less instant rumors of divorce. When, in September, they engaged in ostentatious public displays of affection on a series of red carpets during a film festival tour, that was deemed suspect, too. In other words, Heard has been thrust early into what her friend Olivia Wilde describes as "someone else's spotlight." But as soon as you meet her, you think it's only a matter of time before the spotlight becomes her own.

Over the summer, we met in the chic hotel in Paris where she was staying while promoting Magic Mike XXL. (The film is a fast-paced, hunk-studded comedy with serious dance numbers, but when Heard appears on-screen, the whole thing seems to slow down, as if the camera is literally entranced by her.) She arrived with her blonde hair falling around her shoulders as if recently unscrunched from a towel. On these press tours, she explained, you're pressed up against the glass, barely allowed to get out and relax. Still, she does so when she can. "I'm really good at it," she added with a grin, "which is, perhaps, why I must look like this …"

Like what? I wondered, as she patted nonexistent bags under her eyes and ordered coffee. To anyone but herself, she looked dewy-skinned, bright-eyed, neat-featured, as if she'd just sprung out of a rosebud like a character in a fairy tale. She wore a cream cashmere T-shirt and black Yves Saint Laurent jeans, with two mismatched gold earrings. "Is it still 1,000 degrees outside?" she asked. Mostly while on press tours, she stays indoors, going from hotel to hotel in city to city. Mostly there is no weather where she is.

"I've been on the road or on the run since I was 16," she says. Which is it? "A bit of both," she replies with a smile. Wilde met Heard on the set of Nick Cassavetes' 2006 crime film, Alpha Dog, and she remembers that Heard was "so fearless, already. She was at once wise and completely wild. She carries a certain grace that's inherent to her. But she's also spontaneous and very hungry for life. I think fearlessness is unusual in Hollywood but common in great actors."

Until she married Depp, Heard made a Los Angeles duplex apartment her base, but it was more like "ground zero for packing" than a home. Now she and Depp—who owns an island in the Bahamas—live in L.A. in something not dissimilar to a commune, with her younger sister, Whitney, next door and her best friend across the way. Heard describes it as a kind of "punk-rock Friends": "You know, how they're constantly coming in and out of each other's apartments?"

Private by nature, yet forced into the public and living out of a suitcase, she makes sure that when she's in L.A. she's surrounded by friends and family. "Every night, we have family dinners," she says. She loves to cook—she has a particular affinity for Southern food—so they use her kitchen, but they eat in her sister's dining room. (Heard does not look like she lives on a diet of Southern food, but then, none of her appetites are noticeable in her figure. In a kitchen scene in Magic Mike XXL, costar Channing Tatum says, "We were sitting around talking about what was better, cookies or cake, and we rolled it into the scene. She also ate about half of a red velvet cake, and I respect that.")

The trouble is, she's away all the time. "Combine it by two when I share a life with someone who also travels; it means that I'm never in a place for more than about a week or 10 days, ever." She and Depp have to make a point of spending time together. As soon as she was done in Paris, she would fly to Australia, where Depp was filming the latest installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, and where she was welcomed by criminal charges for having illegally brought their dogs, Pistol and Boo, on a previous trip in May. The importation charges carry a potential sentence of 10 years in prison, and Heard is still battling the case. (At least the couple got a holiday in Southeast Asia together after the furor.)

Heard is cautious about speaking of Depp, and as for the recent rumors of their separation: "I try not to react to the horrible misrepresentation of our lives," she says, "but it is strange, and hard." She says she would love to have children, and that being a stepmother to Depp's—16-year-old Lily- Rose and 13-year-old Jack—is "an honor and the greatest, most surprising gift I have ever received in my life … I feel new flavors that I didn't know existed. New colors that I didn't know existed have been added to my life. I'm so happy."

When describing growing up in Texas, she stresses the isolation and relative poverty of Manor (pop. less than 7,000), just outside Austin. Her mother worked for the state, in telecommunications. Her father ran a construction company that employed mostly Spanish-speaking laborers, and Heard's Spanish reveals either an incredible ear or a precocious sense of democracy. David Heard had three daughters; the one he chose to treat, effectively, as a son, was middle child Amber. He also broke horses. "I was around a lot of young, spirited, untrained horses and learned how to ride in a very aggressive manner," she recalls. She also became her father's hunting and fishing buddy, though she didn't shoot anything herself. "I was very girly on the inside," she suggests, "but my dad was not raising a girly girl. He was raising someone who could keep up with him."

One thing Heard got from her upbringing was a strong work ethic. "You respect what it takes to earn it [money]," she explains, "and it also gives you a certain resilience, because it minimizes this false notion that that's what matters. I know that to not be true, and I know I'm fine without it. That's why maybe I'm so independent. I never expect anyone to give me anything—the notion of someone supporting me would be absurd to me."

FULL INTERVIEW IN THE LINKS

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