His defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard has exposed the apparently longtime open secret of the actor's substance abuse and erratic behavior.
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The PR campaign may not be going quite as well as Depp planned.
One of Heard’s witnesses this week, the actor Ellen Barkin,
told a story about Depp’s overindulgence that long predated his marriage. In Barkin’s telling, Depp was “drunk all the time” during production of the 1998 film “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” and once threw a wine bottle across a room during an argument on set.
The behavior issue had leaked out into the press in recent years. In late 2020, The Hollywood Reporter
published a piece declaring Depp “radioactive” and “out-of-control,” calling him “a casualty of Hollywood’s sycophant culture in which his wild spending and substance abuse was rarely challenged.” Depp earned hundreds of millions through the wild success of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, although
his fortune had largely been squandered. As a producer who worked on a film with Depp told the outlet: “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.”
“I am not some maniac who needs to be high or loaded all the time,” he told the court.
Messages shown to the jury told a different story. In
text after text, Depp referenced his “monster” ― the ugly side of him that came out when he had consumed too much ― and made apologies or regretfully acknowledged that he had imbibed too heavily.
“Pills fine. Booze, my capacity is too large and I won’t stop. Ugly and sad. Oh, how I love it,” he wrote in one text message to a friend. In another message, sent during a period of sobriety, Depp told Heard’s mother that her daughter helped him get through “a hell of my own doing.”
Jacobs called her former client “extraordinarily talented,” but said that he had “fundamental issues with anger” and “romanticized the entire drug culture.”
“Everybody I think deep down inside was [concerned],” Witkin testified. “But, like I said, the people on payroll won’t really say much.”
“They’ll try, but they don’t want to lose their job,” he said.
A 2018 Rolling Stone
piece on Depp’s grim financial situation ended on a note of melancholy as writer Stephen Rodrick observed, after visiting Depp at a rented London mansion, “There is no one around him who isn’t getting paid.”
Such was the dynamic when, according to Heard, Depp became blackout drunk on a plane, accusing her of having an affair with actor James Franco. He allegedly slapped her in front of multiple other people.
“No one said anything. No one did anything. You could hear a pin drop on that plane,” Heard said. “You could feel the tension, but no one did anything.”
(Depp testified that he was on opioids during the 2014 plane ride and not in any condition to act as the aggressor, rather, he locked himself in the bathroom to get away from Heard. But a text message indicated that he had been drinking and taking substances like cocaine.)
Heard alleged that Depp’s team helped to cover up his misconduct. Security personnel would ignore him when, she alleged, he yelled at or smacked her, and they would change him out of soiled clothing when he passed out.
The overall picture has been one of increasingly worsening behavior.
Mandel testified that Depp began spending “very, very, very large” sums of money ― he said the actor shelled out $300,000 per month on staff ― and with the spending came a volatility.
“My experience was that Mr. Depp became increasingly less constrained, less concerned with whether he was going to upset someone’s feelings,” Mandel said.
It was in Australia that Depp and Heard got into a massive fight at the mansion he’d rented. The incident resulted in the tip of Depp’s finger being sliced off ― and production on “Pirates” being temporarily shut down ― although each party blames the other for the injury. Depp said that Heard cut his finger when she threw a bottle at him. In her time on the stand, Heard
outlined the course of a three-day bender in which Depp allegedly took an unknown quantity of drugs and consumed an unknown quantity of alcohol, and sliced his finger off while destroying a telephone. He blamed her for “ruining” his life, she said. Photographs displayed at the trial show cryptic messages written on mirrors and furniture in what Heard says was blood and paint ― Depp’s blood, from his finger.
“Good luck and be careful at top,” read a message scrawled on a lampshade.
Toward the end of her working relationship with Depp, Jacobs said, studios were “reluctant to use him.”
