Johnny Depp’s career and finances were already in decline before Amber Heard’s domestic violence charges in 2018, witnesses said in the actor’s defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife on Thursday.
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Johnny Depp “became the biggest movie star in the world” before “his star withered away on drugs and alcohol,” said Tracey Jacobs, who was his agent for 30 years before being fired in October 2016.
“It got a lot more complicated” because of “his unprofessional attitude,” she said in pre-taped testimony aired in court in Fairfax, near Washington.
“He was consistently late for almost every movie,” she explained.
“Teams don’t like to wait hours for the star of the film to show up, and word has gotten around […]it stopped people from using it,” the agent said.
According to her, his drug and alcohol use made him even more angry and hindered his acting work. He regularly used an earphone to have someone whisper his lines to him, Ms. Jacobs noted. She claimed never to have witnessed any acts of violence by the actor.
The fifth installment in the Pirates of the Caribbean saga, filmed in Australia in 2015, had been put on hold for several weeks after Johnny Depp was hospitalized after he committed a particularly sordid sexual assault during an argument with his wife degenerated, had severed a finger.
The actor claims to have been injured by a bottle thrown by his wife, which she strenuously denied.
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Johnny Depp accuses Amber Heard of ruining her reputation and career by claiming in a 2018 Washington Post article that she suffered domestic violence two years earlier when they were married, without giving her name.
He assures that these allegations have prompted Disney Studios to strip him of the role of the famous Captain Jack Sparrow in the sixth part of Pirates, which he was supposed to direct.
However, according to Tracey Jacobs, “no one has committed to giving him the role.”
By 2016, “his star had faded and it was becoming increasingly difficult to find roles for him because of his reputation,” she said.
The previous year, he was paid $25 million to film the fifth installment of Pirates, but only $5 million for Murder on the Orient Express, which released in 2017, she said.
However, Johnny Depp continued to live with large expenses, said his former money manager Joel Mandel, who had worked with him since 1999 before his 2016 sacking.
According to him, Johnny Depp earned around $600 million during that time.
But as of 2010, Johnny Depp’s career stumbled with “several sequel films that didn’t pan out,” he explained in his pre-taped testimony.
In 2015, he was “extremely concerned” about the actor’s financial situation. “As time went on, it became clear that there were alcohol and drug issues,” he said. “It led to a more erratic attitude.”
It cost him $100,000 a month to treat his drug addiction and he paid his full-time helpers $300,000 a month, he noted.
The trial is scheduled to last until May 27, after which the seven jurors will retire to deliberate.
The two actors began dating in October 2011 before marrying in February 2015. Amber Heard, 36, filed for divorce in May 2016, accusing her husband of domestic violence. She had dropped the charges before the divorce was finalized in early 2017.
Johnny Depp, who claims he has never raised a hand against a woman, lost a first defamation case in London in 2020 against British tabloid The Sun, which had called him an “abusive husband”.