sep 11, 2016 - SUNDAY TIMES iO: INTERVIEW Johnny & Amber: My Broken Best Friends

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Johnny & Amber:
My broken best friends

The writer iO Tillett Wright lived with the troubled Hollywood couple and witnessed first hand their volatile relationship, which ended in divorce and accusations of physical abuse. He
tells us why he had to speak out against his former pal, Depp

Giles Hattersley
Sunday September 11 2016, 12.01am BST
The Sunday Times

Later this month, iO Tillett Wright’s extraordinary new memoir about his hard-scrabble upbringing as the son (and
sometimes daughter) of the fiercest bitch ever to come out of 1980s New York bohemia will be published. It’s fabulously miserable: drugs, domestic violence, burlesque and so much gender fluidity, you practically need a paddle to get through it. Thankfully, it is also excellent and has put Tillett Wright, an LGBT rights
campaigner and first-time author who now lives in LA, on lots of “autumn’s best” lists alongside new books from Zadie Smith and Marina Abramovic

There is another reason the 31-year-old is getting so much attention: his intriguing friendships with Hollywood’s most secretive A-lister, Johnny Depp, and his ex-wife Amber Heard. He lived with the actors for a year, before the couple tied the knot in 2015. When, earlier this year, they spectacularly untied it, he was front and centre. In May, it was Tillett Wright who called the police over concerns that Depp had physically abused his wife; he had overheard a fight between the couple while on the phone to Heard. Heard has since said she won’t press charges against Depp. But it was this phone call that kickstarted the public unravelling of one of Hollywood’s most fiercely
guarded relationships.

It got pretty grim. During divorce proceedings, Heard turned up to court with a bruised eye, alleging that Depp had repeatedly assaulted
her during their relationship. Tillett Wright was even named in her divorce papers, which described a horrible-sounding incident: “As my
call to iO went through on speaker phone, Johnny ripped the cell phone from my hand and began screaming profanities and insults at
iO. I heard iO yell at me to get out of the house … Johnny then grabbed the cell phone, wound up his arm like a baseball pitcher and threw the cell phone at me, striking my cheek and eye with great force … I then yelled out ‘Call 911’, hoping it would be heard by iO, who was still on the phone.”

Like I said: grim. Last month, Heard agreed to a $7m settlement from Depp, which she donated to domestic violence and children’s charities, and said she would not be pressing criminal charges against her ex-husband. But it’s an industry town, so the scandal is still
simmering away when I meet Tillett Wright for lunch at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, practically next door to the Depps’ former home. Before things got nasty, Tillett Wright was a terrific friend of Depp’s and still has an air of the nutsy beatnik about him: bequieed and befuddled as he arrives with a fluey white “emotional-support dog” called Leo in his arms as he couldn’t find a lead. There’s blood on his shoes from where he cut himself renovating his new house in the California desert, though his perfume is French and expensive and his jeans and white T-shirt are pristine. Tillett Wright was born female, but currently identifies as a man. He is tall and friendly looking, and — if it matters to you — you can make your own mind up about where he falls visually on the gender scale from the photos.

Naturally, he’s fascinated by gender. “His and hers,” he teases, arching a brow when we order a burger (him) and a salad (me). In 2012, he
gave a TED talk called Fifty Shades of Gay that has notched up 2.5m hits online, and he takes his role as the first trans man to present a
reality-TV programme — MTV Suspect — seriously (though the show is pretty rubbish). But mostly he’s a photographer and artist,
currently in the process of a mammoth project photographing 10,000 “non-straight” faces, including that of his friend the model Cara
Delevingne. None of this, frankly, prepares you for how fantastic his memoir is. Called Darling Days, it is a jaw-dropping account of his
childhood and life pre-Depp — part misery-memoir, part roaring history of seedy New York in the 1980s.

First, though, the elephant in the room. It was through his rackety network of New York/LA boho types — artists, actors, “creatives” —
that Tillett Wright met Heard. They are a freewheeling lot: before Depp, Heard dated a woman, the photographer Tasya van Ree, for
four years, but after she married the film star, the three of them — Heard, Depp and Tillett Wright — developed a close bond.

He and Depp became especially close, “like brothers”, he says. Tillett Wright even moved in with them when he was in the midst of a
mental breakdown three years ago. But in the days after Heard went public with her sensational claims of Depp’s spousal violence, Tillett Wright decided to post an online blog post that began: “I called 911 because she never could …”

The post has now been removed from the internet, but in it, he claimed Depp had got physical with Heard for the duration of their
short marriage (“a kick on a private plane”, “her pillow covered in blood”) and called out “the culture of victim blaming” that saw his friend branded a gold-digging shrew who was gunning hard for Depp’s $400m fortune. “That situation was so public,” he marvels today. But he felt he had to say something. “I’m not ever going to be
one of them — I’m not ever going to be an A-list celebrity. But I chose to get involved in that situation because it was imperative to say what
I thought was right.”

He has been stunned by the fallout. Even after she donated her huge settlement to charity, Heard has been vilified online for daring to
besmirch the name of one of Hollywood’s most beloved actors. Tillett Wright shakes his head. Apparently, he says, the $7m settlement
Heard ended up taking was only about a sixth of what she could have got. “And she paid all her own legal fees,” he tuts, so it effectively cost
her money to leave Depp.

Money, of course, is a hazardous issue at the best of times. Tillett Wright says that after his breakdown Depp offered to sort him out
financially, but he rejected the offer. He felt Depp had already been generous enough putting him up, and knew that accepting cash could risk poisoning the friendship. Depp apparently has a hard time trusting people’s motives.

Like Heard, Tillett Wright has also suffered at the fingers of online trolls. Although his blog post was remarkably sympathetic to Depp,
given the circumstances — “we all love him”, it read — he has received a tsunami of hate from Depp’s devotees. The more poisonous corners
of the internet have gifted him the lovely moniker “Toilet Wright” and call him “a cancerous feminist”, “hater dyke” and “f****** genderfluid liar.” Who knew Pirates of the Caribbean fans were so angry?

“You know what I did the day it [the blog] came out?” says Tillett Wright. “I was flying to New York and gave my assistant the password
to my Instagram account and told him to go on and erase every single comment. I turned Twitter off and didn’t look at Facebook for three
days. I shut off the internet and it was this incredible thing: I didn’t experience any of it. I learnt a long time ago that if you look at the
comments on YouTube or TMZ, the lowest dregs of humanity go on there to write things they feel about themselves pointed at you. So I
don’t do that.”

He sighs. “I don’t care about being famous or being in the tabloids.”

Have his friendships with Depp and Heard managed to endure the fallout? “Yup.” Pause. “One of them. Amber is one of my best friends.”

And Johnny? He sighs again. “It’s a tough thing. My attitude about that is the same as the attitude about my parents. People are very
rarely bad people. People have things that happen to them, and people have pain that they’re trying to get around.”

In this case, Tillett Wright is talking about Depp’s long-documented troubles with booze and drugs, not to mention that the actor also
buried his mother this year. Famously sensitive, years of insane fame and mega wealth have reportedly left Depp isolated and prone to
paranoia.

“Everybody is trying to dance with their pain and sometimes it’s, who do you stab in the process?” says Tillett Wright. “It’s what you do
about having stabbed them that’s the delineation between people you can have in your life and people you can’t.”

Apparently he’s unable to have Depp in his life at present because, so far, the actor has been unapologetic in public. And in private, it would
seem. It’s sad, because at one point, at least, Depp appears to have been a stabilising force in Tillett Wright’s life. He tells me about a
devastating breakup he went through and how, feeling suicidal, he’d gone back to New York to confront an ex-girlfriend. “I had some friends here [in LA] who were very well oe and kind and generous. They said when I left, ‘You shouldn’t go to New York. If you want to come back, you pull the ripcord, we’ll have you here faster than you can say our names.”

Those names being Johnny and Amber? He nods. “I called them and was, like, ‘Ripcord, ripcord, ripcord’, and they got me on a plane. They saved my life,” he says, “one hundred per cent.”

After that, he lived with them both for a year and it was at this time that he started writing his memoir in earnest. At Depp’s urging (with
an irony that in retrospect is a bit depressing), he joined a 12-step programme for the abused friends and family of addicts, going to
meetings “every day for six months just to understand my own psychology”.

I have to say, my jaw was on the floor for most of the time I spent reading Darling Days. iO, who is named after one of Jupiter’s moons, “the most volcanic object in the solar system”, was born female, though, aged five, decided he wanted to live as a boy, which he did for
eight years, before deciding to live as a girl again in his mid-teens. These days he’s a trans man, complete with male pronouns. Whether
he will physically transition is still unclear. “That’s the last thing I want to write about,” he says, though he has, of course. His tale of
leaping back and forth across the gender divide is riveting, whether it’s negotiating childhood sleepovers or losing his/her virginity in
umpteen combinations.

Politically, Tillett Wright might be your typical Trump-loathing liberal, but if you have even a passing interest in the emerging trans
movement, you should give it a read. Or, frankly, even if you don’t, because it’s a stonking tale, exquisitely told. Raised by a speed addled, showgirl mother and heroin-addicted artist father, Tillett Wright spent his early years living on a notorious block of social
housing on New York’s Lower East Side.

“The Ellis Island of the criminally insane,” he calls it. Neighbours included a Hell’s Angels chapter and a halfway house, and the
pavements were so deep with sleeping homeless people and used needles that it was often hard to cross the street. Yet the most
startling figure in the mix was Rhonna, his rapacious, dance-mad single mother, who stalked the streets getting into fights with anyone who crossed her and going through men like Kleenex.

“They invented the word glamazon for my mother,” he says. “Somewhere in her life she slipped onto a different track, because she
was destined for megastardom. She should have been Grace Jones.” Instead, by the time of his birth, she was well on her way to becoming
“a vortex of damage” and “the loneliest wolf”.

For iO’s first 13 years, until he was brave enough to blab to child services (who sent him to live with his father in Germany), Tillett
Wright lived a lonely and isolated existence, being tugged around the Big Apple at all hours of the day by a not-always-lucid mother, who, it
later transpired, was mostly drunk and high on dextroamphetamine (medical speed).

She hoarded, she yelled, she dated violent men. “You know what’s crazy?” he says, as his mind drifts to Heard. “I have never thought of
myself as someone who witnessed or was part of domestic violence. But I was.”

How … how … I begin to ask. “How am I still speaking to her?” he says, laughing. “I love my mom! I have a great deal of compassion for her.”

I wonder if the feeling will be mutual once the book is published. The first chapter is an open letter to her, so he took it round to read to
Rhonna in his teenage bedroom where she had once tried to bashdown his door with a baseball bat while amphetamined up to the
eyeballs.

It doesn’t sound like an encounter that was ever destined to end well. In the event, she fidgeted and shimmied nervously, but was initially
positive about the book. Then, a few days later, “she completely loses her shit”, he says, dropping into an outrageous New York accent
straight out of Scorsese. “ ‘People are not going to talk to me anymore, you have a different version of events than I do …’ I was, like, ‘Funny
that the sober one would have a different version of events to the one who was drunk all the time.’ ” Pause. “She never said that I was lying about anything.” Tillett Wright claims she might even go to the book launch later this month.

Rhonna may have dropped the ball catastrophically when it came to the basic tenements of childcare, but she was a top-notch ally in the gender war.

“They didn’t give a f***,” Tillett Wright says of his decision, aged five, to tell his parents that he wasn’t a girl but actually a boy.

School was more trying, however. In the boys’ lavatories he used to turn his trainers around in the stall so it looked like he was peeing the
right way round. But he was convincing enough to make it as a (male) child actor, playing a series of cheeky chappies in cheesy 1990s
movies, opposite the likes of Christian Slater and Steve Buscemi. But his first period was a blow, arriving at the same time as his first crush
on a girl, leaving him to feel like he’d been “microchipped by womanhood”.

His late teens and early twenties were similarly chaotic: being kicked out of a British boarding school, dealing cocaine in New York, dating
models (male), carnival dancers (female) and starting a hip grasti fanzine.

He is clearly still a work in progress. While he’s terrific company in that thrilling/slightly scary way that really damaged people are, most
days he wonders if he’ll make it past 35. He recalls a conversation that he had a few years ago with his dad, who, like his mother, is now
sober.

“My dad is the coolest human on earth,” he says. “I called him a few years ago and said, ‘Hey, I think maybe I was right when I was five
and wrong when I was 14. I think I might be a man.’ He was, like, ‘Whatever you are, you’re my kind.’ That, I think, is the single greatest thing you can say to your child.”

Why does he think it took him so long to work out his gender identity?

He bursts out laughing. “I don’t know how I got to be 28 years old, doing the work that I do — literally travelling the country photographing trans people — and I never allowed myself to wonder if I was trans. Hello!” he cries. “I lived as a f****** boy for eight years.” So what’s next? Normally he’s in a rush to do everything, he says, “but I’m really OK with taking a lot of time to figure out whether or not I want to cut my tits off. It’s been two years now of dipping my toe into the pronoun pond. A couple of my closest friends tried out ‘he’ and I liked it, then more friends tried and now I am ‘he’, and when people call me ‘she’ I bristle. That feels so wrong.”

Another reason he is in no rush is because he wants to have children. Biologically? I ask. He nods. “My whole life I’ve wanted to carry a
child.” We talk about the infamous poster for the 1990s romcom Junior, featuring a pregnant Arnold Schwarzenegger, and share a
little shudder. “If I want to have a child, I don’t want it to be some circus show. If I was to transition hormonally and then was pregnant,
that would be such a spectacle that the experience would be taken away from me. I don’t want that. I want that experience to be mine.”

Whatever happens, I’ll be fascinated to read the next instalment. Perhaps there is only one thing we can guess with any certainty: Johnny Depp won’t be the godfather.

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