Johnny Depp’s career and finances were already on the decline before Amber Heard’s 2018 domestic violence charges, witnesses in the actor’s defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife said Thursday.
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Johnny Depp “became the biggest movie star in the world” before “his star withered” from drugs and alcohol, said Tracey Jacobs, who was his agent for 30 years, before to be dismissed in October 2016.
“It got a lot more complicated” because of “his unprofessional attitude,” she said in pre-recorded testimony broadcast in court in Fairfax, near Washington.
“He was consistently late to just about every movie” he was doing, she explained.
“Teams don’t like to wait hours for the star of the film to show up and the word was getting around […]it made people reluctant to use it,” said the agent.
According to her, his drug and alcohol use also made him more angry and handicapped him in his acting work. He thus regularly used an earpiece so that someone whispered his lines to him, noted Ms.me Jacobs. She claimed to have never witnessed violent acts on the part of the actor.
The fifth part of the saga Pirates of the Caribbean, filmed in 2015 in Australia, had thus been interrupted for several weeks because Johnny Depp had been hospitalized after having severed his finger during an argument with his wife which had degenerated into a particularly sordid sexual assault.
The actor claims to have been injured by a bottle thrown by his wife, which she strongly denied.
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Johnny Depp accuses Amber Heard of ruining his reputation and career by claiming in a 2018 article by the Washington Post that she had suffered domestic violence two years earlier, when they were married, without however mentioning her name.
He assures that these allegations prompted Disney studios to deprive him of the role of the famous captain Jack Sparrow in the sixth installment of Pirates, that he had to turn.
However, pointed out Tracey Jacobs, “no one had committed to him having the role”.
By 2016, “his star had faded and it was getting harder and harder to find roles for him because of his reputation,” she said.
The previous year, he had received $25 million to shoot the fifth part of Pirates, but only $5 million for The crime of the Orient Express, released in 2017, she said.
Johnny Depp, however, continued to live at great expense, said his former wealth manager, Joel Mandel, who had accompanied him since 1999 before being sacked in 2016.
According to him, Johnny Depp earned around $600 million during this period.
But, beginning in 2010, Johnny Depp’s career stumbled with “several sequel movies that didn’t pan out,” he explained in his pre-recorded testimony.
In 2015, he was “extremely worried” about the actor’s financial situation. “Over time, it was clear there were alcohol and drug issues,” he said. “That translated into a more erratic attitude.”
Treatment for his drug addiction cost $100,000 a month and he paid his full-time aides $300,000 a month, he noted.
The trial is due to continue until May 27, after which the seven jurors will retire to deliberate.
The two actors had started an affair in October 2011 before getting married 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 laid his hands on a woman, already lost in 2020 a first defamation lawsuit in London against the British tabloid The Sun, who called him a “violent husband”.