Johnny Depp’s career and finances were already in decline before Amber Heard’s domestic violence charges in 2018, witnesses in the actor’s defamation lawsuit against his ex-wife said on 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 she was fired in October 2016.
“It became much more complicated” because of “his unprofessional attitude,” he said in prerecorded testimony broadcast at the Fairfax courthouse near Washington.
“I was constantly late for almost every movie” he was doing, he explained.
“Crews don’t like to wait hours for the star of the movie to show up and word got out […]it made people reluctant to use it,” the agent said.
According to her, his drug and alcohol use also made him angrier and hindered him in his acting work. Therefore, he regularly used a headset to have someone whisper his lines to him, Ms.I Jacobs. He claimed never to have witnessed violent acts by the actor.
The fifth part of the saga. Pirates of the Caribbean, shot in 2015 in Australia, it had been interrupted for several weeks because Johnny Depp had been hospitalized after cutting his finger during an argument with his wife that 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 denies.
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Johnny Depp accuses Amber Heard of ruining his reputation and career by claiming in a 2018 article from the Washington Post that she had suffered domestic violence two years earlier, when they were married, without mentioning her name.
He assures that these accusations led the Disney studios to strip him of the role of the famous Captain Jack Sparrow in the sixth installment of pirates, that had to turn.
However, Tracey Jacobs noted, “no one had committed to him having the part.”
By 2016, “his star had faded and it was getting harder and harder to find roles for him because of his reputation,” he said.
The previous year he had received 25 million dollars to shoot the fifth part of pirates, but only $5 million for The Orient Express crime released in 2017, he said.
However, Johnny Depp continued to live at great cost, said his former wealth manager, Joel Mandel, who had been with him since 1999 before being fired in 2016.
According to him, Johnny Depp earned around $600 million during this period.
But starting in 2010, Johnny Depp’s career was stumbled by “several sequels that didn’t work out,” he explained in his prerecorded testimony.
In 2015, he was “extremely concerned” about the actor’s financial situation. “Over time, it became clear that there were problems with alcohol and drugs,” 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 helpers $300,000 a month, he said.
The trial will continue until May 27, after which the seven jurors will retire to deliberate.
The two actors began an affair 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 she finalized the divorce in early 2017.
Johnny Depp, who says he has never laid hands on a woman, already lost a first defamation lawsuit in London in 2020 against the British tabloid Sun, who called him a “violent husband”.
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