Johnny Depp gestures to fans in court after closing arguments during his defamation case against ex-wife Amber Heard. Photo / AP
Depp's string of flops – and bad behaviour – had ruined his reputation long before Amber Heard accused him of anything. Can he come back?
Eighteen billion TikTok views. As of yesterday on the social media platform, this is how many videos had been watched with the hashtag #justiceforjohnnydepp. Vindication, surely, not just for Depp himself, but the hordes of endlessly loyal, vituperative supporters following the actor's US$10.35 million win in his defamation case against ex-wife Amber Heard.
But there's a slight problem with those fans: they will be absolutely no help to him in rebuilding a viable career. After all, how many views did his most recent film, the piddling photography biopic Minamata (2020), score in comparison? It took US$1.7m at the global box office; a sliver of the traction his courtroom antics got. The dawdling post-colonial fable Waiting for the Barbarians (2019) managed less than half of that.
Sharing a hashtag, it seems, is much easier than buying a ticket at your local cinema. Johnny Depp may be an enormous star of his own cause célèbre about alleged spousal abuse, but as a movie star he's long past his prime.
Not that Depp himself agrees. "The best is yet to come and a new chapter has finally begun," he wrote in his post-victory statement. "Veritas numquam perit. Truth never perishes." The truth, however, is that a Johnny Depp comeback is far from guaranteed.
"But he has his next film lined up already!" the avid supporters may crow. "Playing a French king so beloved he was nicknamed 'Louis the Beloved'!" This film is Jeanne du Barry, a recently announced period drama about the famed mistress of Louis XV. The passion project from French actress-director Maïwenn was being shopped around the Cannes market last week prior to production starting. Maïwenn will play Jeanne, and Depp will be Louis, with Louis Garrel in a supporting role, presumably playing one of the Maîtresse's many, many other lovers.
If it all goes swimmingly, and even gets made, the film could very well pop up at Cannes next year, and perhaps Depp will swish down for his red-carpet moment. It may give the Deppsters slightly more pause – let's face it, that fickle horde are never going to watch this thing anyway – when they learn what a deeply unsexy time Louis XV had of his final years in Versailles.
Riddled with the smallpox that eventually killed him, he frittered away his earlier public acclaim to the point where he became actively despised, and is often credited for kick-starting the French Revolution. So, it'll be Depp's most all-round-depressing turn since he played the depraved Earl of Rochester in The Libertine (2004).
For anyone to pretend even for a second that a crowd-pleasing comeback begins here, or that Hollywood will pay it much heed, is more laughable than anything in the psychotically unfunny 2015 art-heist bomb Mortdecai. ("Even dedicated fans will find their hearts shrivelling up like week-old party balloons at its all-pervading air of clenched desperation," wrote my colleague Robbie Collin in his review.)
Depp, it's true, has survived many a flop in his day – Nick of Time (1995), The Brave (1997), The Astronaut's Wife (1999), The Ninth Gate (2000), The Man Who Cried (2000). He and Heard even met on the set of one, Bruce Robinson's botched 2011 Hunter S Thompson adaptation The Rum Diary.
He has spoken openly about not caring when his films lose money. But big-ticket failures such as 2013's The Lone Ranger (which lost Disney almost US$200 million) and 2014's Transcendence (cost US$150 million, takings US$103 million) pre-date even his truly problematic era. Only after the first Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) – a runaway success, from which Depp was nearly fired by nervous Disney execs during production – was he in any way trusted as a commercial force. Disney chiefs were also anxious about the fifth Pirates film, released in 2017, which got a big overseas push to make a profit. It cost an eye-watering US$230 million to make and grossed US$795 million; tellingly, only US$122 million of that came from the US.
Even before the box-office receipts were in, Depp's behaviour on the set of that film had perhaps jeopardised his leading man status more than any of Heard's accusations. As his former agent Tracey Jacobs testified during the court case, Depp infuriated the Pirates crew by being "consistently" late, throwing temper tantrums and not knowing his lines, which had to be fed to him through an earpiece: "I would get yelled at," she said. "I never said to him, 'You're a difficult client', but I was very honest with him and said, 'You've got to stop doing this, this is hurting you.' And it did."
Hollywood can no doubt stomach many of the lurid details revealed during the trial - the vile "burn her" texts, the talk of "cavity searches", the sliced-off fingertips. But being late costs money.
Depp's pre-Pirates career had been one of the most interesting in modern Hollywood – full of fantastic offbeat work like Cry-Baby (1990), Ed Wood (1994), Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995), and a sterling dramatic performance in Donnie Brasco (1997). But he's been on a headlong losing streak for some time, with only Jack Sparrow and Tim Burton throwing him sporadic lifelines. Lately, two Burton-produced Depp vehicles in a row – Dark Shadows (2012) and Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) – flopped dismally.
The Depp brand may not be too toxic for TikTok, but it definitely is for Disney, who pulled him out of a sixth Pirates in 2016 and have shown no signs of wanting him reinstated. Warner Bros followed suit by yanking him away from Fantastic Beasts - even though he was well into his creepy phase as the diabolical villain, Grindelwald - and replaced him for the third one with Mads Mikkelsen. After those brutal manoeuvres, it'll take daunting amounts of repositioning – and no amount of fan petitions – for studio chiefs to be comfortable rolling the dice on a Depp blockbuster.
Not that Depp die-hards will easily accept this. Following a spot of online sleuthing, they have concluded that Depp is in line for a mystery role in Beetlejuice 2, the long-proposed sequel to Tim Burton's 1988 comedy, which is yet to be given the go ahead and vaguely slated for 2025. Any such film would definitely reunite original stars Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder, but on the strength of a threadbare Google listing that sticks Depp's headshot next to theirs, the #justiceforjohnny rumour-mills have been working overtime.
While it would make a certain amount of sense for his old ally Burton to help Depp back into Hollywood's good books (and profit ledgers), this all smacks of wishful thinking. Tune in tomorrow, and Depp's latest salvation will be an untitled Terry Gilliam project of which even Terry Gilliam hasn't heard.
Vanquishing the memory of Depp's courtroom performance, with all those sinister smirks behind shades, is going to take a far mightier PR effort than redeeming Tom Cruise, say, from those antics on Oprah's sofa. It's hard to imagine how the goofball leading-man charisma of Depp's Captain Jack days can ever return.
His adoring public may grow to miss Depp's tommy-gun drive-bys as John Dillinger in Public Enemies (2009), his frolicsome turn as the throat-slitting barber Sweeney Todd (2007), that reptilian pate he wore while stifling prostitutes as Boston gangster Whitey Bulger in Black Mass (2015). But none feels as terminally uncuddly as his current look.
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