8 h, dec 9, 2020 y - HOLLYWOOD REPORTER He’s Radioactive Inside Johnny Depp’s Self-Made Implosion BY TATIANA SIEGEL

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“He’s Radioactive”: Inside Johnny Depp’s Self-Made Implosion

It wasn't just the erratic and violent behavior that unmade Johnny Depp as one of the world's most bankable stars. It was his unquenchable thirst for revenge.

BY TATIANA SIEGEL

In the face of mounting bad publicity, Johnny Depp could still count on one friendly industry group — a Polish film festival.

On Nov. 21, the embattled star was poised to receive a career honor during the 28th EnergaCamerimage cinematography gala and had agreed to appear remotely from the U.S., with his virtual presence touted in the press. As an added seal of approval at a needed moment, the festival scheduled his latest film, the low-budget period drama Minamata, as its closing-night offering. But after a montage of clips showcasing Depp’s “unique visual sensitivity,” the 57-year-old actor failed to materialize onscreen. Instead, he sent along a bizarre picture of himself — open-shirted and with platinum blond hair peeking out from under a pair of colorful scarves. Inexplicably, he appeared to be standing behind bars in a Caribbean prison — resembling a carefree swashbuckler serving time for a crime that he doesn’t quite take seriously. Minamata, featuring Depp as real-life war photographer W. Eugene Smith, never screened. MGM, the film’s distributor, removed it during the seven-day festival citing piracy concerns.

Depp’s absence offered a fitting denouement to a month of reputational and career devastation. On Nov. 2, a U.K. court had ruled against him in his high-stakes libel suit against tabloid The Sun over its description of him as a “wife beater.” In fact, the judge made clear that he believed Depp had assaulted ex-wife Amber Heard on multiple occasions and that she frequently feared for her life. In the ensuing days, Warner Bros. excised him from its Fantastic Beasts franchise — a firing that played out publicly — while sources tell THR that he is no longer involved with a prestige Harry Houdini TV project produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, his most powerful remaining ally. Over the course of four short years, Depp has spiraled from an A-list star responsible for more than $10 billion in worldwide box office to Hollywood persona non grata, beginning when Heard’s abuse allegations first surfaced in 2016 and continuing through a scorched-earth legal strategy that has seen him sue everyone in his path. The result is a tsunami of tabloid fodder as sensitive texts, emails and drug-fueled and violent anecdotes spilled out into the public view. Despite multiple attempts to contact him, Depp could not be reached for comment.

There are few examples of a movie-star implosion of Depp’s magnitude that have been so sudden and spectacular. During the height of his stardom, a 13-year stretch ending in 2016, Depp earned some $650 million, including $55 million from his profit participation on 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, a Disney tentpole that earned $1.03 billion worldwide. For Minamata, which opens Feb. 21, he was paid just $3 million. The claims made in at least six recent suits, along with multiple interviews conducted by THR, paint a picture of an out-of-control Depp, a casualty of Hollywood’s sycophant culture in which his wild spending and substance abuse were rarely challenged. Or as one producer who worked on a recent Depp project notes, “He’s just never been told no for the past 35 years. That’s typical in Hollywood. But I’ve never seen it to this extent.” November 2020 simply offered the punctuation.

Though likely intended as a creative reset, Minamata appears to be something of a career humbling. When CAA was putting the film together in 2018, it wasn’t considering a list of auteurs like Tim Burton. Instead, CAA insisted that the Japan-set drama be helmed by an experimental sculptor turned director with only one unreleased family drama, Lullaby, to his credit: Andrew Levitas, who, unusually for an indie player, albeit one with an impressive career as an artist, has top industry agent Kevin Huvane on his team. When one project insider asked about finding a more seasoned director, the person was told it was Huvane’s call. (But another source says Huvane was hands off.) Depp was to be paid $6 million — light-years from the $40 million he earned on each of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies after profit participation, but financiers became skittish about even that figure after a lawsuit filed by a crewmember on the actor’s City of Lies, a crime drama about the unsolved murders of The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur that was pulled before its September 2018 release by distributor Global Road Entertainment. (The crewmember claimed an intoxicated Depp punched him twice on set.) Depp’s Minamata salary was cut in half, and the film was shot mostly in Serbia instead of a more authentic-looking but also more expensive Asian locale, as originally envisioned. CAA had little luck finding a domestic presale, and the film sat unclaimed for nearly two years until MGM’s American International Pictures label acquired it in October. (A source says the film, which received some critical acclaim following its Berlin Film Festival premiere in February, was acquired for high seven figures.)

Things won’t likely improve for Depp anytime soon thanks to the havoc wrought in the U.K. case. Pick any spot in Justice Andrew Nicol’s 132-page ruling on Depp’s defamation claims against The Sun, and you’re bound to land on an embarrassing detail.

Among the lowlights is a text from Depp to CAA agent Christian Carino, who previously repped Heard, in which he wrote: “[Heard is] begging for total global humiliation. She’s gonna get it. I’m gonna need your texts about San Francisco brother … I’m even sorry to ask … But she sucked [Elon Musk’s] crooked dick and he gave her some shitty lawyers … I have no mercy, no fear and not an ounce of emotion or what I once thought was love for this gold digging, low level, dime a dozen, mushy, pointless dangling overused flappy fish market … I’m so fucking happy she wants to fight this out!!! She will hit the wall hard!!! And I cannot wait to have this waste of a cum guzzler out of my life!!! I met fucking sublime little Russian here … Which makes me realize the time I blew on that 50 cent stripper … I wouldn’t touch her with a goddam glove.”

In another text to actor Paul Bettany, Depp writes, “Let’s burn Amber!!!” To which Bettany, apparently taking it as a joke, responds, “Having thought it through I don’t think we should burn Amber — she’s delightful company and easy on the eye, plus I’m not sure she’s a witch. We could of course try the English course of action in these predicaments ­— we do a drowning test. Thoughts?” Depp adds, “Let’s drown her before we burn her!!! I will fuck her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she’s dead.”

It also appears that Depp attempted to interfere with the career of Heard, whom he met on the set of the 2011 drama The Rum Diary and married in 2015. “I want her replaced on the WB film,” he wrote to his sister, producer Christi Dembrowski, who previously had a deal with the studio and was influential there. During the trial, he admitted that this was a reference to the Warner Bros. film Aquaman, in which Heard starred.

“He has suffered immense reputational carnage from a reckless set of choices that has left him in septic muck,” says Eric Schiffer, a crisis PR rep whose clients include a number of high-profile Hollywood and sports figures. “Can he come out of that? It really comes down to Johnny’s choices. He still has a fan base that in many ways is like Donald Trump’s with their emotional intensity and commitment to a star icon. It’s not based around principles. It’s about charisma and their identification of the range of characters that he’s played.”

But Hollywood decision-makers may be less forgiving in light of the U.K. trial’s copious drug references — cocaine, alcohol, Xanax, Adderall, Roxicodone, magic mushrooms and ecstasy. Depp had been earning his $20 million-plus up-front paydays from the major studios, all owned by increasingly risk-averse and reputationally sensitive publicly traded media giants. And while shooting Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales in Australia, Depp swallowed eight ecstasy pills at once, according to testimony in the U.K. case, and embarked on a campaign of terror aimed at Heard. It culminated with the tip of his finger being sliced off, which resulted in his being flown back to Los Angeles for surgery. Pirates was forced to shut down production for two weeks, costing the studio some $350,000 a day. Depp claimed that Heard threw a bottle of alcohol at him, injuring his finger.

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