Johnny Depp’s lawyers claim that the actor lost a $22.5 million paycheck for reprising his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in a planned sixth Pirates of the Caribbean movie that was taken away from the actor as soon as his ex-wife, Amber Heard, wrote an editorial in the Washington Post in December 2018 that alleged that Depp abused her during their short-lived and tumultuous marriage.
One of the central issues of Depp’s $50 defamation lawsuit against Heard is that even if he can prove that Heard defamed him with the allegations that she made against him in the Washington Post editorial, he will also have to prove that said defamation directly caused the actor financial damages and his departure from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise is a major part of that strategy.
Jack Whigham, Johnny Depp’s agent at Creative Artists Agency and then at Range Media Partners, testified in the trial that they were close to getting Depp signed on for a sixth Pirates of the Carribbean movie before Heard’s op-ed squelched the deal. He explained how devastating having Heard specifically accuse Depp was for Depp’s career, noting, “It was a first-person account coming from the victim. It became a death-knell catastrophic thing for Mr. Depp in the Hollywood community.”
He added, “After the op-ed it was impossible to get him a studio film,” while pointing out that in the year before the Washing Post editorial, 2017, Depp had received paydays of $8 million for City of Lies, $10 million for Murder on the Orient Express and $13.5 million for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. In the year after the editorial, Depp received $3 million for the independent film, Minamata, and has not done a film since.
On cross-examination, Heard’s lawyer, Elaine Bredehoft, pushed Whigham on the fact that Depp did not actually have a deal yet at the time of the editorial and that Disney had already been hesistant to sign Depp for the film. Whigham conceded that, but retorted, “It was trending badly in the late fall on behalf of Disney, but Jerry Bruckheimer [the producer of the film] and I were lobbying to make it happen, and so we had hope. And it became clear to me in early 2019 that it was over.”
Bredehoft also pushed back on the idea that the editorial was the reason, when there had been rumors about abuse in the Heard/Depp marriage going back to their initial divorce settlement in 2016, and that was why Disney was already hesitant to take Depp on for the film.
Source: Variety
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