With their bitter defamation trial now over, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard are left to pick up the pieces of their careers. But how exactly they will choose to move forward — and how much of an appetite Hollywood will have to hire them — remains to be seen.
Six weeks of testimony over sensational allegations of domestic violence and emotional abuse did undeniable damage to the public images of both Depp, 58, and Heard, 36, with millions around the world following every step of the trial and taking sides on social media. On Wednesday, the Virginia jury largely decided in Depp’s favor, awarding him $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages for what it deemed were Heard’s defamatory claims against him. (The latter was reduced by the judge to Virginia’s statutory cap of $350,000.) The jury also awarded $2 million in compensatory damages to Heard in her counterclaim.
Heading into the trial, Depp boasted by far the larger career between the two exes, having racked up more than $8 billion in worldwide box office grosses thanks to blockbusters including the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films, “Alice and Wonderland” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” In his suit against Heard, in which he sought $50 million in damages, Depp claimed he had lost tens of millions of dollars worth of career earnings because of her allegations against him.
The fact is, however, Depp’s career had been trending downward even before Heard penned the 2018 op-ed that sparked the litigation. During the trial, Depp’s former agent and business manager each testified that his unprofessional behavior — showing up late to set, relying on an earpiece for dialogue — as well as his reputation for substance issues had made major studios reluctant to work with the actor. In 2020, Depp was dropped by Warner Bros. from the “Fantastic Beasts” franchise after losing his 2020 libel trial in the U.K.
“I was very honest with him and said, ‘You’ve got to stop doing this. It’s hurting you,’” Depp’s former agent, Tracey Jacobs, testified about his offscreen troubles, adding, “His star had dimmed.”
Indeed, even before Heard’s allegations surfaced, Depp had suffered a number of high-profile flops in the past decade, including such films as “Dark Shadows,” “Mortdecai,” “Transcendence” and “Black Mass.” Since 2018’s “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald,” he has appeared in just three low-budget films, none of which were received significant domestic releases, with the most recent, “Minamata,” earning just $1.2 million worldwide.
Even as Hollywood has held him at a distance, however, Depp still commands an intensely loyal fan base. At this year’s Academy Awards, “Minamata” — in which he played a photographer who documented the effects of mercury poisoning on the citizens of a Japanese city — placed third in the Oscars fan-favorite contest after diehard Depp fans voted en masse via Twitter to show their support for the star.
Data compiled in recent weeks by the insurance and finance group Spotted Media through surveys with a representative sample of hundreds of U.S. adults found that, irrespective of the outcome of the trial, many still want to see Depp continue to star in films. Among those respondents who were aware of the lawsuit, more than 86% felt that Johnny Depp should not be dropped from future productions.
For Heard, the survey’s findings were far more stark. Among those who were tracking the trial, more than half of respondents said that they were less interested in seeing the actress in future films, with nearly two-thirds saying they believed Heard should be dropped from future productions.
Spotted Media chief executive Janet Comenos said film producers have been interested in seeing what the data shows about public sentiment toward Depp and Heard as they gauge the risks of hiring the actors.
“It has come up in several conversations of ours with producers; they are curious to understand if there’s a discrepancy between the actions taken by the studios and the public’s opinion,” Comenos says. “I think the results show pretty clearly that Johnny Depp is extremely hireable and that it would be a risk to a production company to hire Amber Heard because of the precipitous drop in appeal that she has had since the beginning of the trial.”
