How Did Johnny Depp Find Himself in a Financial Crisis?

For years, Depp has topped the box office as one of Hollywood’s highest-paid actors, yet somehow he’s facing a financial hole. The actor is charging his former business managers, Joel and Robert Mandel, with fraud, while their counterclaim cites his manic spending: the private islands, French château, 156-foot yacht, and much, much more.

It was a lovely night for a difficult meeting. Late last October, Johnny Depp sat for dinner with two forensic accountants and his business manager of six months, Ed White, in the bucolic backyard of White’s house, in Bel Air, California. Also present was a guest from Washington, D.C., Adam Waldman, a lawyer whose clients reportedly include Angelina Jolie and Cher. Waldman recalls there were vintage wines from White’s cellar and a catered meal served by a team of waiters. But behind the pleasantries lay a disturbing topic of conversation: the condition of Depp’s finances.

Depp professed to be in shock. After all, he is paid up to $20 million a picture. How could he possibly be so strapped for cash that his former business manager, Joel Mandel, had told him it was necessary to sell major assets, such as his château on the French Riviera? Dressed in his trademark quasi-pirate attire—heavily pinned leather jacket and an assemblage of scarves, bangles, rings, and tattoos—and rolling his own smokes, Depp told Waldman, “I’m not a lawyer. I’m not an accountant. I’m not qualified to help my 15-year-old son with his math homework. . . . I’ve always trusted the people around me.”

White’s accountants claimed to have found anomalies in the handling of Depp’s finances by his former business managers, Robert and Joel Mandel, and their firm, the Management Group (TMG). These, Waldman would later charge, included late payment of income tax and disbursing nearly $10 million to “third parties [including Depp’s sister] close to or who worked for Mr. Depp, without Mr. Depp’s knowledge or authorization.” These transgressions and others caused Depp to borrow tens of millions of dollars at high interest rates, with his film residuals as collateral, according to Waldman. The charges were vigorously denied by the Mandels and TMG, which called them “fabricated and replete with demonstrably false allegations.”

“What’s the amount that Johnny has made [over the 17 years the Mandels represented him]?” Waldman asked White at the backyard dinner.

“Six hundred and fifty million dollars,” White replied. From that sum TMG had been paid 5 percent, and Depp’s attorney Jake Bloom got another 5 percent, for a total of around $65 million.

At the conclusion of the dinner, Waldman remembers Depp asking, “Will you represent me? Will you get to the bottom of this and give me some advice?”

On January 13, after Waldman had worked with White and eight additional lawyers to sift through about 24,000 e-mails, Depp’s attorneys filed a scathing lawsuit against TMG, seeking $25 million in damages for negligence, fraud, unjust enrichment, and breach of fiduciary duty, among other things. Eighteen days later, TMG responded with a blistering 31-page cross-complaint, claiming that Depp was a spendthrift of epic proportions, who, despite his manager’s constant warnings, refused to curb his “selfish, reckless, and irresponsible lifestyle.”

By 2013, Depp’s expenses had ballooned to $2 million a month, TMG claimed—a burn rate disputed by his new attorney. The Mandels’ cross-complaint describes 14 residences, including the château in France and a four-island chain in the Bahamas. There were also a 156-foot cash-guzzling yacht and 12 Los Angeles storage facilities full of memorabilia, including 70 collectible guitars, plus major artwork by Klimt, Modigliani, and Basquiat, among others. Forty full-time employees cost Depp $300,000 a month, they claimed—although Waldman says there are only 15 employees, some of them consultants. Round-the-clock security for himself, his two children, and various family members costs $150,000 a month more. In addition to the $10 million supporting friends and family, he spent $30,000 a month on wine “flown to him around the world,” the lawsuit alleges, and $5 million for a blowout memorial service for the late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, including blasting his ashes from a 153-foot custom-built cannon at Thompson’s home in Aspen. (Depp idolized Thompson and later told his attorney, “If I had $5 million and one dollar, I [still] would have done it. That was my brother.”)

Depp’s fiery, 15-month marriage to the actress Amber Heard cost himanother $7 million. Three years after meeting on the set of The Rum Diary, in which Depp played a rum-addled Hunter S. Thompson, the couple began living together. The union ended in a tabloid feast, which included a temporary restraining order and accusations of domestic abuse. Heard detailed two of Depp’s supposedly violent episodes against her in a court declaration. Soon, there were photographs in the media of her with a black eye and a bloody lip.

Depp’s team issued denials. “Amber is attempting to secure a premature financial resolution by alleging abuse,” said Depp’s lawyer Laura Wasser in a court document. Heard filed for divorce on May 23, 2016. A settlement was announced in August, a few days before the couple was due in court.

Amber Heard did what abuse victims are “supposed” to do. People still didn’t believe her

 The divorce of Amber Heard and Johnny Depp is now final, and one thing’s for sure: Heard didn’t get any money out of it.

She settled the divorce out of court for $7 million, all of which she has now donated to charitable causes. She’s splitting the sum between the American Civil Liberties Union’s efforts to battle violence against women and the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, where she’s volunteered for the past 10 years.

And in a joint statement, both Heard and Depp affirmed that "neither party has made false accusations for financial gain."

In other words: Heard is not a gold digger, and she did not accuse Depp of cutting off part of his finger and then using the stump to finger paint the words "Easy Amber" on a mirror because she thought that would be a cool quick way to make some cash.

It’s a shame Heard felt the need to be so emphatic about the fact that she isn’t lying about her domestic violence claims, but it’s not surprising. Ever since she first filed for a restraining order against Depp in May, Heard has done everything we say domestic abuse survivors should do. She went to the police. She provided copious documentation. She went above and beyond to prove she wasn’t in it for the money.

People still insisted she was lying.

The history of Heard’s domestic violence allegations spans at least two years

On May 21, Heard says she asked a friend to call the police after Depp hit her with an iPhone and struck her. When they arrived, Heard told them she and Depp had only been arguing — which she now says was an attempt to protect Depp’s career. (It’s extremely common for victims of domestic abuse to feel the need to protect their abusers.)

According to text messages obtained by Entertainment Weekly, the May 2016 incident wasn’t the first time Depp had attacked Heard. Dated two years earlier, in May 2014, the messages detail an incident in which Depp kicked Heard. They also refer to a history of abuse. "He’s done this many times before … and I always stay," Heard writes. "Always believe he's going to get better...And then every 3 or so month [sic], I'm in the exact same position."

The day after the May 21 call to police, Heard and Depp separated. A day later, Heard filed for divorce. And a few days later, Heard filed for a restraining order.

Gossip coverage was immediately skeptical

TMZ broke the news of Heard’s request for a restraining order with a deeply skeptical post, whose second sentence reads, "Sources connected to Johnny are calling BS, saying Amber ‘is an affront to real victims of domestic violence.’" The story also notes, coyly, "It's interesting ... she's asking for a temporary restraining order claiming there's an immediate threat of harm, but Depp has been out of town since Wednesday promoting his new movie."

The comments left by readers are more than skeptical. "Everything is a made up story from Amber's mouth," one says. "She is so vindictive-what is it she really wants? No. couldn't be all this is to get money!"

"She has proved time after time she is after the money," another says. "its a shame that she would try to get so much publicity from something soo serious."

Then the evidence emerged: pictures of the bruises on Heard’s face, the broken champagne bottles Heard said Depp threw at her, the shattered glass on the floor.

TMZ’s commenters were having none of it.

"She’s in it for the money," wrote one.

"I don’t believe a word this whore has to say," said another.

Not long after, TMZ published an article alleging that Heard had absolutely no bruises on her face two days after Depp supposedly attacked her. "She is a lying piece of poo," one commenter opined.

Meanwhile, the comedian Doug Stanhope had published an op-ed at the Wrap stating that Heard was in fact the villain in the situation. "Johnny Depp got used, manipulated, set up and made to look like an a–hole," Stanhope wrote. "And he saw it coming and didn’t or couldn’t do anything to stop it."

It’s true that no one would think TMZ’s comment section is the place to look for feminist-friendly debate. But TMZ is also one of the biggest and most influential sites in the gossip industry. Its writers regularly break news — including the fact that Heard was seeking a restraining order — and their coverage sets the tone for the rest of the culture. If they suggest a woman is probably lying about domestic violence, that becomes the dominant narrative for a good long while afterward.

The gossip press’s response painted Heard as the villainous wife from Gone Girl

What emerges from this type of coverage is a narrative in which a young woman fabricates a story about domestic abuse and cynically manufactures several years’ worth of evidence to support it, which she then leaks slowly to the police and the public in a vicious attempt to slander her husband and steal all his money.

It’s a narrative in which it seems implausible that a woman who is frequently followed by paparazzi might have covered her bruises with makeup when she went out in public. No, she must have inflicted the bruises on herself just before she went to the police station.

In other words, this is a narrative in which people are more willing to believe that Gone Girl is a documentary than that Heard is telling the truth, and that her much older, richer, and more powerful husband abused her. We’re about five minutes away from someone suggesting that Heard killed Neil Patrick Harris mid-coitus — that’s how desperate some people are to ignore the fact that the evidence against Depp is extremely compelling.

The "Heard is lying" narrative is an extremely familiar one

It’s not really surprising that so many people think Heard is lying. That’s what usually happens when a woman accuses a powerful and beloved man of hurting her. But it’s telling that this narrative persists even after Heard went out of her way to knock it down.

Traditionally, when a woman accuses a famous man of hurting her, the responses are 1) there’s no proof, and 2) she’s just doing it for the money and the attention. It’s a ready-made narrative we return to over and over, so there are many versions of it, but here’s a nice clear example in National Report’s fervent defense of Bill Cosby:

Most of these depreciated old skanks will fabricate some ludicrous tale of sexual assault decades after they claim the incident(s) occurred. This way they can destroy reputations, smear an individual’s successful career, and in this case taint Cosby’s good name by rousting a bunch of dizzy unattractive lesbians [I am cutting this for length as the description of angry feminists goes on for quite a few lines] … though no evidence exists to support their fabricated malicious and destructive fictional accounts of abuse.

And in today’s digital age where any moron can claim anything they want and spread it across the Internet we’re already seeing the damning effects of groundless accusations. In spite of not having a single shred of evidence against Cosby, Netflix, NBC and TV Land have terminated future projects involving Cosby, or have removed Cosby entertainment from their programming. These inconsequential women well know the wreckage they can cause by making unsubstantiated and baseless allegations. They also know important luminaries who’ve earned their wealth and reputations through hard work, education, charitable works and living a moral life in the footsteps of Jesus will settle out of court to avoid enormous legal fees, courtroom drama and bad press.

This passage is the logical underpinning for comments like "she is a lying piece of poo" or "she is after the money." The woman is always after the money; she didn’t go to the cops when it happened; there’s no evidence; she’s just trying to destroy a good man’s life; and we know all this because it’s always what we say when a woman accuses a famous man of hurting her.

And we repeat the same story on a smaller scale when non-famous women accuse non-famous men of hurting them. We say these women are almost always liars, that they weren’t really hurt, that they’re just trying to destroy innocent men. Statistically, that’s almost never true, but we say it anyway.

Heard’s experience is a perfect example of how poorly we treat victims of domestic abuse

Here’s the thing: Heard did go to the cops when it happened. She went to the police with fresh, visible bruises on her face.

She did provide evidence. She provided photographs and witness testimony and text messages that back up her story.

She’s not after the money. She gave it all away.

She was, in every way, exactly the kind of victim we say women should be if they want us to believe them.

It didn’t matter. We still said she was lying.

Heard ultimately dropped the domestic violence charges and settled the divorce out of court. When TMZ reported that she would be donating her settlement money, the commenters reacted exactly the way you would expect by now:

Her lies are all around. She said she earned $10,000 a month but spent $50,000 so she needed alimony from JD to live her lifestyle, but now she's giving all this money to charity? Really??? Crazy and liar....

Our treatment of Heard proves that it doesn’t really matter how women act when they accuse men of hurting them. We don’t really care. We’ll find a way to call them liars no matter what they do.

Source:TMZ

Johnny Depp’s domestic abuse allegations deserve as much attention as his assassination joke

 

Over the past few days, Johnny Depp has found himself in the news for two different reasons — one that’s being treated as a potentially career-ending mistake, and another that’s been greeted with a nearly universal shrug.

On Thursday at the Glastonbury arts festival, Depp jokingly suggested assassinating President Trump. “When was the last time an actor assassinated a president?” he asked, adding, “I want to clarify: I’m not an actor. I lie for a living. However, it’s been a while, and maybe it’s time,” in what seemed to be an allusion to John Wilkes Booth, the actor who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. The statement drew immediate and widespread outrage, with many calling for a general Hollywood boycott and many major news outlets reporting on the controversy. The White House issued a statement condemning the joke, and Depp made a public apology.

Earlier this week, Depp’s managers filed court documents alleging that they witnessed Depp being violent toward his ex-wife Amber Heard, and that they can confirm the statements Heard made to the police and in court were correct. (Heard and Depp settled their divorce suit out of court, with Heard dropping all charges.) The story was picked up by a few gossip outlets and small news sites, but it was largely ignored until after news of Depp’s assassination joke broke and it became rhetorically useful to be able to refer to Depp as a “drunk” and a “wifebeater.”

Depp seems to have weathered the domestic violence charges while taking minimal damage to his career — he’s still the face of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, and he still has a major role in the Harry Potter spinoff franchise Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them — but the Trump assassination joke may have finally crossed a line. Almost everyone, regardless of political affiliation, agrees it is in poor taste and completely unacceptable. That was not the universal opinion when Amber Heard accused Depp of hurting her; fans and gossip tabloids roundly accused her of being a lying gold digger, and studio executives shrugged and put Depp in major franchises anyway.

The reaction to Depp’s controversies mirrors a larger problem: As a culture, we have a tendency to treat domestic violence as violence that “doesn’t count,” certainly not the way politically motivated violence does. Domestic violence is nothing to ruin a man’s life over, the idea seems to be, but even a joke about political violence? Well, that’s serious business.

But studies have shown that the gunmen who commit mass shootings are likely to have a history of domestic violence — and if we as a culture took domestic violence seriously, we might have much better luck in stopping political violence before it ever happened.

There’s no reason to think Depp will actually try to assassinate Trump. But the culture’s attitude toward his two crimes is telling.

None of this is to suggest that we should take Depp’s joke about assassinating President Trump to be a genuine threat. There is no real reason to think that Johnny Depp is actually planning to leave acting behind to become an assassin, and it would be absurd to treat his terrible joke as the expression of a concrete plan.

But there are multiple credible allegations explicitly stating that he beat his wife.

Our attitude toward Depp’s two crimes — a documented history of abuse that’s met with a shrug on one side, and a tasteless joke about assassination met with mass outrage on the other — mimics our larger cultural attitude toward domestic violence. We generally don’t consider violence against women to be a big deal until it leads to political violence. And ironically, that attitude means we don’t notice when perpetrators of domestic violence are ready to move into the sphere of political violence.

It’s time to recognize that violence against women is violence, full stop, and to take it just as seriously as we take bad jokes about political violence.

Domestic violence can be a training ground for political violence

As Amanda Taub has pointed out in the New York Times in her article on the correlations between domestic violence and terrorism, about nine times more people die from domestic violence every year in the United States than have died from terrorism in the US over the past decade. Domestic violence is so overwhelmingly common, in fact, that it is rarely considered major news: Man-hurts-woman is generally treated as a dog-bites-man kind of story.

But domestic violence can be an early warning sign for terrorism. The gun control group Every town for Gun Safety studied all of the mass shootings that took place in the US between 2009 and 2015, and found that 57 percent of the shootings were directed at or involved members of the perpetrator’s family.

Many of the perpetrators of the most high-profile mass shootings of recent years have had domestic violence in their pasts. James T. Hodgkinson, the gunman who shot Republican Congress members at a baseball park last week, was arrested for domestic violence in 2006. Omar Mateen, the gunman behind last year’s Pulse nightclub shooting, had been accused of beating his wife. Robert Lewis Dear, who attacked a Planned Parenthood in 2015, was accused of physical abuse by two of his three ex-wives and of sexual violence by another woman. But these men only came to be considered major threats to society once they had committed politically motivated mass violence.

Johnny Depp: A Star in Crisis and the Insane Story of His “Missing” Millions

What happened to $650 million? An explosive legal battle between one of Hollywood's best-paid actors and the business managers he fired has laid bare tumultuous finances, outrageous spending and troubling behavior on Disney's new 'Pirates' movie in a case that could even change how the industry does business.

Early one afternoon in October 2012, Jake Bloom and Joel Mandel left their respective Beverly Hills offices, slipped into their luxury cars and embarked on the roughly 30-minute journey to the Hollywood Hills compound of their client, Johnny Depp. Bloom was a rumpled and graying lawyer whose disheveled style camouflaged an intellect exercised on behalf of such luminaries as Martin Scorsese and Sylvester Stallone. Mandel, then in his early 50s, was a tall, rather amiable accountant who favored loose-fitting jeans and looser-fitting shirts, sartorial code designed to assure his clients he was just another boy in their band as well as a top-flight business manager steeped in the arcana of arbitrage and amortization.

Both men had been close to Depp for years. Bloom, indeed, was such a confidant to the actor that he had even joined him for an induction ceremony into the Comanche nation when he played Tonto in The Lone Ranger; as for Mandel, he had accompanied Depp to his three-island property in the Bahamas, atolls Mandel had helped his client buy for a total of $5.35 million.

These men were part of Depp’s inner circle, at least as far as any lawyer or accountant could belong to the inner circle of an artist this mercurial, one with a skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his leg and “Death is certain” scrawled beneath it, whose soul mates were such creative titans as Marlon Brando, Keith Richards and Hunter S. Thompson — the journalist whose ashes Depp fired from a cannon hauled to the top of a 153-foot tower, a tribute for which the actor says he paid $5 million.

Leaving their cars that day, the advisers approached one of Depp’s five houses on a dead-end stretch of North Sweetzer Avenue. A modernist affair that was simply referred to as 1480, the building had been converted into a recording studio and was an appendage to an eight-bedroom, castle-like mansion once owned by music producer Berry Gordy. One of the star’s two omnipresent assistants led the men in, past a painting that British artist Banksy had created for Depp, and into a den, where the actor was leaning back in a slightly battered chair, surrounded by dozens upon dozens of classic guitars.

After the obligatory small talk, the visitors got to the point: Depp’s cash flow had reached a crisis point, they declared. Even though the star had become wildly wealthy (later, Mandel would claim Depp earned more than $650 million in the 13-plus years he had been represented by The Management Group, the company Mandel had started in 1987 with his brother Robert), there just wasn’t enough liquid money to cover Depp’s $2 million in monthly bills.

Without a fire sale, Depp — then arguably the biggest star in Hollywood and certainly one of the best paid, thanks to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise — would never be able to meet his obligations. Not the payments on his portfolio of real estate around the world. Not the impulse purchases such as the three Leonor Fini paintings he had bought from a Manhattan gallery (the first two for $320,000, the third as a $245,000 gift for then-girlfriend Amber Heard). Not the $3.6 million he paid annually for his 40-person staff. Not the $350,000 he laid out each month to maintain his 156-foot yacht. And not the hundreds of thousands of dollars he paid to sustain his ex-partner, Vanessa Paradis, and their children, Lily-Rose and Jack.

Mandel dug into his briefcase for a one-page summary he had prepared, but Depp waved it away. Still, after three hours, the actor agreed to a compromise: He would sell his beloved Amphitrite, the yacht he had bought for $10 million and spent $8 million renovating, where he’d hosted such friends as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

With his consent in place, Bloom and Mandel said their goodbyes, stepped out of the house and breathed a sigh of relief. The city stretched before them. The bright light that had bathed it when they arrived was fading and would soon give way to night.

That exchange, the start of an increasingly fraught relationship between the star and his team, would culminate in the 2016 firing of Mandel and Depp’s longtime agent, United Talent Agency’s Tracey Jacobs, along with a $25 million lawsuit filed Jan. 13 by Depp against the Mandels’ TMG, accusing them of fraud and mismanagement, among other things.

TMG has since countersued, alleging that Depp, now 53, failed to pay its commission on his income from the upcoming Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales and painting a portrait of an out-of-control movie star, reeling from a nasty split from Heard and used to spending freely, including $30,000 a month on wine. The Mandels seek a court declaration that “Depp is responsible for his own financial waste”; Depp’s side wants them to pay him millions, claiming they served as lawyers as well as accountants and therefore — if Depp’s interpretation of a California statute is correct — had no right to a percentage of his earnings without a proper contract.

The lawsuits, along with multiple interviews conducted by THR, indicate that Depp’s capricious behavior and poor decision-making placed him in a serious financial bind, which paved the way for the rupture with his closest advisers. (All declined to comment; while Bloom has not been fired, he has had no contact with Depp for months.)

It is unclear how the actor’s problems have impacted his relationship with his sister, Christi Dembrowski, a longtime conduit to her brother and head of his production company who selected Mandel in the late 1990s as one of three potential business managers for Depp to interview. Dembrowski allegedly received $7 million in “loans” as TMG managed Depp’s estate. She, like Depp, did not respond to requests for comment.

The unfolding legal battle could shake some of Hollywood’s most established business traditions. Depp’s new attorney is challenging the common practice of lawyers taking a percentage of their clients’ earnings without a written contract. If the suit is successful, it could open the door to a host of similar challenges.

All this comes as Walt Disney Studios prepares for the May 26 release of its latest Pirates movie, the fifth in the series. Studio execs worry that Depp’s personal peccadilloes could impact the marketing of their $230 million-budget tentpole and future of a $3.7 billion box-office franchise. Six years have passed since the last Pirates installment earned more than $1 billion globally, and Depp’s most recent big-budget vehicle, Alice Through the Looking Glass, lost hundreds of millions of dollars for Disney; now it’s betting that the star’s private struggles won’t sink this movie, too.

Depp’s demons — which seemed to surface in November 2014, when he appeared to be inebriated while presenting at the Hollywood Film Awards — became public when he was living in Australia for Pirates 5. Filming ran from February until July 2015, a span during which allegations of conflict between him and Heard spilled into the Australian tabloids.

“You’ve got to understand the kind of pressure Johnny was under in Australia,” says producer Jerry Bruckheimer. “At times helicopters would follow him home. There would be so many media outside his gates that trucks were feeding them. There was so much stuff made up about him: that Johnny had a fight on set and had gone back to the States, which we both read about while we were in his trailer.”

Still, sources close to the production report tales of excessive drinking, physical fights with Heard and constant lateness on set, which often left hundreds of extras waiting for hours at a time. Time and again, Bruckheimer, an assistant director and a flotilla of Disney executives led by production chief Sean Bailey were forced to huddle and debate how to handle their star’s tardiness. “He’s not a morning person,” quips one member of that group.

“There were certainly days when our plans were challenged,” says Bailey. “But no one should underestimate Johnny’s passion and commitment to this character and franchise.”

Several times, the production staff raised the matter of Depp’s tardiness with him, both on set and in his trailer, in a largely fruitless attempt to have him toe the line.

Often, sources say, a production staffer was stationed in an unmarked car outside the Coomera, Queensland, compound that Depp had rented from Grand Prix champion Mick Doohan so that the sentinel could alert everyone the second a light was switched on in the morning (or afternoon).

“When he got up, he’d turn on the light, and the moment the light went on they’d call the line producer, who would then call the directors [Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg]: ‘He’s up! He’s getting ready!’ ” says an on-set source. “They even had a special code term, like ‘The eagle has landed.’ Johnny had no idea this was going on.”

Depp’s lateness and alleged heavy drinking caused enough concern that Jacobs, his then-agent, got into an argument with Bruckheimer when they were waiting on a set in the Gold Coast suburb of Helensvale. “She went over to Jerry and said, ‘You’ve got to do something! You’re the producer,’ ” recalls the production source. “He said, ‘You do something. You’re the agent.’ ” (Bruckheimer denies the spat took place.) “Everyone was an innocent bystander watching this train wreck,” the source continues. “But when Johnny came on set, he was charming, nice. He’s yin and yang.”

Filming shut down at one point when Depp injured himself, slicing open his finger. “That was pretty serious,” says Bruckheimer. Though many outlets reported the wound was the result of a booze-fueled marital dispute, Bruckheimer suggests otherwise. “We don’t really know. He got it caught in a car door, or he got it caught in a sliding door. I’ve heard a couple of versions.”

Asked whether Depp has put his troubles behind him since then, at least one ally insists that he has. “I just saw him [on May 3]; he’s never looked better,” says litigator Martin Singer, who has worked with him for two decades, though not on the current lawsuits. “The guy was as fit as a fiddle.”

By the time he had begun shooting Pirates, Depp already was withdrawing from his closest reps. Jacobs, who had signed him after seeing the late-1980s Fox series 21 Jump Street, was ostracized and eventually fired in a short phone call. Colleagues say she was devastated. Mandel got his walking papers on March 14, 2016, in the form of a letter that insiders say stunned the business manager, who had seen Depp weeks earlier. That meeting had ended with a hug and a kiss.

By all objective measures, Depp’s representatives seem to have served their client well. Following 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the actor routinely earned $20 million upfront against 20 percent of the backend per picture and had a perk package worth approximately $3 million. According to one source, he reaped more than $40 million apiece from his share of the backend of the Pirates movies and made some $55 million from his profit participation on 2010’s Alice in Wonderland, which earned $1.03 billion worldwide.

It is unclear how much Depp understood that these large numbers were not the amounts he could spend. UTA took 10 percent off the top; Bloom and Mandel each took another 5 percent; taxes and business expenses further reduced the income to far less than half the gross number. And after a tri­fecta of big-budget flops — 2014’s Transcendence, 2015’s Mortdecai and the Alice sequel in 2016 — it became clear the spigot was tightening.

Depp’s current lawyer, hired in October, insists the actor was not properly advised and that Depp’s interest lay in his artistry, rather than his finances. But reps for TMG say Depp repeatedly was told to tighten the reins. The Mandel countersuit alleges that he ladled out $75 million on buying and updating 14 residences; owned more than 200 artworks, including some by Klimt, Warhol and Modigliani; kept a memorabilia collection in 12 storage facilities; and spent another $1 million archiving it.

Johnny Depp

John Christopher Depp II (born June 9, 1963) is an American actor, producer, and musician. He has been nominated for ten Golden Globe Awards, winning one for Best Actor for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), and has been nominated for three Academy Awards for Best Actor, among other accolades.

Depp made his debut in the horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), before rising to prominence as a teen idol on the television series 21 Jump Street (1987–1990). In the 1990s, Depp acted mostly in independent films, often playing eccentric characters. These included What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), Benny and Joon (1993), Dead Man (1995), Donnie Brasco (1997) and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998). Depp also began collaborating with director Tim Burton, starring in Edward Scissorhands (1990), Ed Wood (1994) and Sleepy Hollow (1999).

In the 2000s, Depp became one of the most commercially successful film stars by playing Jack Sparrow in the swashbuckler film series Pirates of the Caribbean (2003–present). He received critical praise for Finding Neverland (2004), and continued his commercially successful collaboration with Tim Burton with the films Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), Corpse Bride (2005), Sweeney Todd (2007), and Alice in Wonderland (2010). In 2012, Depp was one of the world's biggest film stars, and was listed by the Guinness World Records as the world's highest-paid actor, with earnings of US$75 million. During the 2010s, Depp began producing films through his company, Infinitum Nihil, and formed the rock supergroup Hollywood Vampires with Alice Cooper and Joe Perry.

Early life and ancestry

John Christopher Depp II was born on June 9, 1963, in Owensboro, Kentucky, the youngest of four children of waitress Betty Sue Palmer (née Wells) and civil engineer John Christopher Depp. Depp's family moved frequently during his childhood, eventually settling in Miramar, Florida in 1970. His parents divorced in 1978 when he was 15,and his mother later married Robert Palmer, whom Depp has called "an inspiration".

Depp was gifted a guitar by his mother when he was 12 years old, and began playing in various bands.He dropped out of Miramar High School aged 16 in 1979 to become a rock musician. He attempted to go back to school two weeks later, but the principal told him to follow his dream of being a musician. In 1980, Depp began playing guitar in a band called The Kids. After modest local success in Florida, the band moved to Los Angeles in pursuit of a record deal, changing their name to Six Gun Method. In addition to the band, Depp worked a variety of odd jobs, such as in telemarketing. In December 1983, Depp married make-up artist Lori Anne Allison, the sister of his band's bassist and singer. The Kids split up before signing a record deal in 1984, and Depp subsequently began collaborating with the band Rock City Angels. He co-wrote their song "Mary", which appeared on their debut Geffen Records album Young Man's Blues. Depp and Allison divorced in 1985.

Depp is primarily of English descent, with some French, German, and Irish ancestry. He is descended from a French Huguenot immigrant (Pierre Dieppe, who settled in Virginia around 1700) and from colonial freedom fighter Elizabeth Key Grinstead (1630–1665), daughter of an English planter and his African slave. In interviews in 2002 and 2011, Depp claimed to have Native American ancestry, stating, "I guess I have some Native American somewhere down the line. My great-grandmother was quite a bit of Native American, she grew up Cherokee or maybe Creek Indian. Makes sense in terms of coming from Kentucky, which is rife with Cherokee and Creek Indian." Depp's claims came under scrutiny when Indian Country Today stated that Depp had never inquired about his heritage nor was he recognized as a member of the Cherokee Nation. This led to criticism from the Native American community, as Depp has no documented Native ancestry, and Native community leaders refer to him as "a non-Indian". Depp's choice to portray Tonto, a Native American character, in The Lone Ranger was criticized, along with his choice to name his rock band "Tonto's Giant Nuts". During the promotion for The Lone Ranger, Depp was adopted as an honorary son by LaDonna Harris, a member of the Comanche Nation, making him an honorary member of her family but not a member of any tribe. Critical response to his claims from the Native community increased after this, including satirical portrayals of Depp by Native comedians. An ad featuring Depp and Native American imagery, by Dior for the fragrance "Sauvage", was pulled on in 2019 after being accused of cultural appropriation and racism.

Career

1984–1989: Early roles and 21 Jump Street

Depp greeting President Ronald Reagan at a White House benefit for The Nancy Reagan Drug Abuse Fund in 1988

In the early 1980s, Depp's then-wife Lori Ann Allison introduced him to actor Nicolas Cage, who advised him to pursue an acting career. Depp's first film role was in the horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), in which he played the boyfriend of the main character and one of Freddy Krueger's victims. After a starring role in the comedy Private Resort (1985), Depp was cast in the lead role of the skating drama Thrashin' (1986) by the film's director, but the decision was later overridden by its producer. Instead, Depp appeared in a minor supporting role as a Vietnamese-speaking private in Oliver Stone's Vietnam War drama Platoon (1986). Depp became a teen idol during the late 1980s, when he starred as an undercover police officer in a high school operation in the Fox television series 21 Jump Street, which premiered in 1987. He accepted this role to work with actor Frederic Forrest, who inspired him. Despite his success, Depp felt that the series "forced him into the role of product."

1990–2002: Independent films and first collaborations with Tim Burton

Disillusioned by his experiences as a teen idol in 21 Jump Street, Depp began choosing roles which he found more interesting, rather than those he thought would succeed at the box office. His first film release in 1990 was John Waters' Cry-Baby, a musical comedy set in the 1950s. Although it was not a box office success upon its initial release, over the years it has gained cult classic status. Also in 1990, Depp played the title character in Tim Burton's romantic fantasy film Edward Scissorhands opposite Dianne Wiest and Winona Ryder. The film was a commercial and critical success with a domestic gross of $53 million. In preparation for the role, Depp watched many Charlie Chaplin films to study the idea of creating sympathy without dialogue. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone praised Depp's performance stating that he "artfully expresses the fierce longing in gentle Edward; it's a terrific performance", while Rita Kempley of The Washington Post stated that he "brings the eloquence of the silent era to this part of few words, saying it all through bright black eyes and the tremulous care with which he holds his horror-movie hands. Depp earned his first Golden Globe nomination for the film.

Depp at the 1992 Cannes Film Festival

Depp had no film releases in the following two years, with the exception of a brief cameo in Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare (1991), the sixth installment in the A Nightmare of Elm Street franchise. He appeared in three films in 1993. In the romantic comedy Benny and Joon, he played an eccentric and illiterate silent film fan who befriends a mentally ill woman and her brother; it became a sleeper hit. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote that Depp "may look nothing like Buster Keaton, but there are times when he genuinely seems to become the Great Stone Face, bringing Keaton's mannerisms sweetly and magically to life". Depp received a second Golden Globe nomination for the performance. His second film of the year was Lasse Hallström's What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), a drama about a dysfunctional family in which he starred alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Juliette Lewis. It did not perform well commercially, but received positive notices from the critics. Although most of the reviews focused on DiCaprio, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance, Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote that "Depp manages to command center screen with a greatly affable, appealing characterization". Depp's final 1993 release was Emir Kusturica's surrealist comedy-drama Arizona Dream, which opened to positive reviews, and won the Silver Bear at Berlin Film Festival.

In 1994, Depp reunited with director Tim Burton, playing the title role in Ed Wood, a biographical film about one of history's most inept film directors. Depp later stated that he was at the time depressed about films and filmmaking, but that "within 10 minutes of hearing about the project, I was committed." He found that the role gave him a "chance to stretch out and have some fun" and that working with Martin Landau, who played Bela Lugosi, "rejuvenated my love for acting". Although it did not earn back its production costs, Ed Wood received a positive reception from the critics, with Janet Maslin of The New York Times writing that Depp had "proved himself as an established, certified great actor" and "captured all the can-do optimism that kept Ed Wood going, thanks to an extremely funny ability to look at the silver lining of any cloud." Depp was nominated for a third time for a Best Musical or Comedy Actor Golden Globe for his performance.

Depp with director-screenwriter Jim Jarmusch at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995

The following year, Depp starred in three films. He played opposite Marlon Brando in the box-office hit Don Juan DeMarco, as a man who believes he is Don Juan, the world's greatest lover. He then starred in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, a Western shot entirely in black-and-white; it was not a commercial success and had mixed critical reviews. Depp's final film of the year was in the financial and critical failure Nick of Time, a thriller in which he played an accountant who is told to kill a politician to save his kidnapped daughter.

In 1997, Depp starred alongside Al Pacino in the crime drama Donnie Brasco, directed by Mike Newell. He portrayed Joseph D. Pistone, an undercover FBI Agent who assumes the name 'Donnie Brasco' in order to infiltrate the mafia in New York City. To prepare for the role, Depp spent time with the real-life Joe Pistone, on whose memoirs the film was based. Donnie Brasco was a commercial and critical success, and is considered to contain one of Depp's finest performances. In 1997, Depp also debuted as a director and screenwriter with The Brave. He starred in it as a poor Native American man who accepts a proposal from a wealthy man, played by Marlon Brando, to appear in a snuff film in exchange for money for his family. It premiered at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival for generally negative reviews. Variety dismissed the film as "a turgid and unbelievable neo-western", and Time Out stated that there's nothing inherently wrong with the film but that "besides the implausibilities, the direction has two fatal flaws: it's both tediously slow and hugely narcissistic as the camera focuses repeatedly on Depp's bandana'd head and rippling torso." Due to the negative reviews, Depp decided not to release The Brave formally in the United States, neither in theaters nor on home media.

Depp was a fan and friend of writer Hunter S. Thompson, and played his alter ego Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), Terry Gilliam's film adaptation of Thompson's pseudobiographical novel of the same name. It was a box office failure, and polarized critics. Later that year, Depp made a brief cameo in Mika Kaurismäki's L.A. Without a Map (1998).

Depp appeared in three films in 1999. The first was the sci-fi thriller The Astronaut's Wife, co-starring Charlize Theron, which was not a commercial or critical success. The second, Roman Polanski's The Ninth Gate, which starred Depp as a seller of old books who becomes entangled in a mystery, was moderately more successful with audiences but received mixed reviews. Depp's third film of 1999 was Tim Burton's adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, where Depp played Ichabod Crane opposite Christina Ricci and Christopher Walken. For his performance, Depp took inspiration from Angela Lansbury, Roddy McDowall and Basil Rathbone, stating that he "always thought of Ichabod as a very delicate, fragile person who was maybe a little too in touch with his feminine side, like a frightened little girl." Sleepy Hollow was a commercial and critical success.

Depp's first film release of the new millennium was British-French drama The Man Who Cried (2000), directed by Sally Potter and starring him as a Roma horseman opposite Christina Ricci, Cate Blanchett and John Turturro. It was not a critical success. Depp also had a supporting role in Julian Schnabel's critically acclaimed Before Night Falls (2000). Depp's final film for the year was Lasse Hallström's critically and commercially successful Chocolat (2000), in which he played a Roma man and the love interest of the main character, Juliette Binoche. Depp's next roles were both based on historical persons. In Blow (2001), he starred as cocaine smuggler George Jung, who was part of the Medellín Cartel in the 1980s. The film underperformed in the box office and received mixed reviews. In the comic book adaptation From Hell (2001), Depp portrayed inspector Frederick Abberline, who investigated the Jack the Ripper murders in the 1880s London. The film was not liked by the critics but was a moderate commercial success.

2003–2011: Pirates of the Caribbean, commercial and critical success

Depp in costume as Captain Jack Sparrow

In 2003, Depp starred in the Walt Disney Pictures adventure film Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which was a major box office success. He earned widespread acclaim for his comic performance as pirate Captain Jack Sparrow, and received Academy Award, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations and won a Screen Actor's Guild Award for Best Actor as well as an MTV Movie Award. Depp has said that Sparrow is "definitely a big part of me", and that he modeled the character after The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew. Studio executives had at first been ambivalent about Depp's portrayal, but the character became popular with audiences. In his other film release in 2003, Robert Rodriguez' action film Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Depp played a corrupt CIA agent. A moderate box-office success, it received average to good reviews, with Depp's performance in particular receiving praise.

Depp next starred as an author with writer's block in the thriller Secret Window (2004), based on a short story by Stephen King. It was a moderate commercial success but received mixed reviews. Released around the same time, the British-Australian independent film The Libertine (2004) saw Depp portray the seventeenth-century poet and rake, the Earl of Rochester. It had only limited release, and received mainly negative reviews. Depp's third film of 2004, Finding Neverland, was more positively received by the critics, and earned him his second Academy Award nomination as well as a Golden Globe, BAFTA and SAG nominations for his performance as Scottish author J. M. Barrie. Depp also made a brief cameo appearance in the French film Happily Ever After (2004).

Depp continued his box-office success with a starring role as Willy Wonka in Tim Burton's adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005). It also had a positive critical reception, with Depp being nominated again for the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical. Chocolate Factory was followed by another Burton project, stop-motion animation Corpse Bride (2005), in which Depp voiced the main character, Victor Van Dort. Depp reprised the role of Jack Sparrow in the Pirates sequels Dead Man's Chest (2006) and At World's End (2007), both of which were major box office successes. He also voiced the character in the video game Pirates of the Caribbean: The Legend of Jack Sparrow. According to a survey taken by Fandango, Depp in the role of Jack Sparrow was the main reason for many cinema-goers to see a Pirates film.

In 2007, Depp collaborated with Burton for their sixth film together, this time playing murderous barber Sweeney Todd in the musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007). Depp cited Peter Lorre's performance in Mad Love (1935), in which Lorre played a "creepy but sympathetic" surgeon, as his main influence for the role. Sweeney Todd was the first film in which Depp had been required to sing. Instead of hiring a qualified vocal coach, he prepared for the role by recording demos with his old bandmate Bruce Witkin. The film was a commercial and critical success. Entertainment Weekly's Chris Nashawaty stated that "Depp's soaring voice makes you wonder what other tricks he's been hiding ... Watching Depp's barber wield his razors ... it's hard not to be reminded of Edward Scissorhands frantically shaping hedges into animal topiaries 18 years ago ... and all of the twisted beauty we would've missed out on had [Burton and Depp] never met." Depp won the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy Actor for the role, and was nominated for the third time for an Academy Award.

In 2009, Depp portrayed real-life gangster John Dillinger in Michael Mann's 1930s crime film Public Enemies. It was commercially successful and gained moderately positive reviews. Roger Ebert stated in his review that "This Johnny Depp performance is something else. For once an actor playing a gangster does not seem to base his performance on movies he has seen. He starts cold. He plays Dillinger as a fact." Depp's second film of 2009, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, reunited him with director Terry Gilliam. Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell each played the character initially portrayed by their friend Heath Ledger, who had died before the film was completed. All three actors gave their salaries to Ledger's daughter, Matilda.

Depp began the 2010s with another collaboration with Tim Burton, Alice in Wonderland (2010), in which he played the Mad Hatter opposite Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway and Alan Rickman. Despite mixed reviews, it earned US$1.025 billion in the box office, thus becoming the second-highest-grossing film of 2010 and one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Depp's second film release of 2010 was the romantic thriller The Tourist, in which he starred opposite Angelina Jolie. It was commercially successful, although panned by critics. Regardless, he received Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy Golden Globe nominations for both films.

Depp's first 2011 film release was the animation Rango, in which he voiced the title character, a lizard. It was a major critical and commercial success. His second film of the year, the fourth installment in the Pirates series, On Stranger Tides, was again a box office hit, becoming the third-highest-grossing film of 2011. Later in 2011, Depp released the first two projects co-produced by his company, Infinitum Nihil. The first was a film adaptation of the novel The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson and starred Depp. It failed to bring back its production costs and received mixed reviews. The company's second undertaking, Martin Scorsese's Hugo (2011), garnered major critical acclaim and several awards nominations, but similarly did not perform well in the box office. In 2011, Depp also made a brief cameo in the Adam Sandler film Jack and Jill.

2012–2021: Career setbacks

In 2012, Depp was one of the world's biggest film stars, and was listed by the Guinness World Records as the world's highest-paid actor, with earnings of US$75 million.

In 2012, Depp and his 21 Jump Street co-stars Peter DeLuise and Holly Robinson reprised their roles in cameo appearances in the series' feature film adaptation. Depp also starred in his eighth film with Tim Burton, Dark Shadows (2012), alongside Helena Bonham Carter, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Eva Green. The film was based on a 1960s Gothic television soap opera of the same name, which had been one of his favorites as a child. Depp also co-produced the film. The film's poor reception in the United States brought Depp's star appeal into question.

Depp at Jerry Bruckheimer's ceremony to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in June 2013

Depp's next starring role, as Tonto in The Lone Ranger (2013), was also not well received by the public or the critics. His casting as a Native American brought accusations of whitewashing, and the film was a box office bomb that caused Walt Disney Studios to take a US$190 million loss. Also in 2013, Depp made a brief cameo in the independent film Lucky Them. His next starring role as an AI-studying scientist in the sci-fi thriller Transcendence (2014) was yet another commercial failure, with mainly negative reviews. His other roles in 2014 were a minor supporting part as The Wolf in the musical adaptation Into the Woods, and a more substantial appearance as eccentric French-Canadian ex-detective in Kevin Smith's horror comedy Tusk, in which he was credited by the character's name, Guy LaPointe.

In 2015, Depp released his fifth co-production for Infinitum Nihil, comedy-thriller Mortdecai, in which he starred opposite Gwyneth Paltrow. It was a critical and commercial failure and earned the main stars Golden Raspberry nominations. Depp's second film released in 2015, Black Mass, in which he played Boston crime boss Whitey Bulger, was better received. Critics from The Hollywood Reporter and Variety called it one of his best performances to date, and the role earned Depp his third nomination for the Best Actor SAG award. However, the film failed to bring back its production costs. Depp also made a cameo appearance in the critically panned London Fields, starring his then-wife Amber Heard, which was to be released in 2015, but its general release was delayed by litigation until 2018. In addition to his work in films in 2015, French luxury fashion house Dior signed Depp as the face of their men's fragrance, Sauvage, and he was inducted as a Disney Legend.

The first film featuring Depp to be released in 2016 was Kevin Smith's critically panned horror-comedy Yoga Hosers, in which Depp and his daughter, Lily-Rose Depp, reprised their roles from Tusk. Next, Depp appeared as businessman and presidential candidate Donald Trump in a Funny or Die satire film entitled Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal: The Movie, released during the run-up to the US presidential election. He earned praise for the role, with a headline from The A.V. Club declaring "Who knew Donald Trump was the comeback role Johnny Depp needed?" It was also announced that Depp had been cast in a new franchise role as Dr. Jack Griffin / The Invisible Man in Universal Studios' planned shared film universe entitled the Dark Universe, a rebooted version of their classic Universal Monsters franchise. Depp reprised the role of the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016), the sequel to Alice in Wonderland. In contrast to the first film's success, the sequel lost Disney approximately US$70 million. It also gained Depp two Golden Raspberry nominations. Depp had also been secretly cast to play dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald in a cameo appearance in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), the first installment of the Fantastic Beasts franchise. His name was not mentioned in the promotional materials and his cameo was only revealed at the end of the film.

Depp at the Alice Through the Looking Glass premiere in 2016

In 2017, Depp appeared alongside other actors and filmmakers in The Black Ghiandola, a short film made by a terminally ill teenager through the non-profit Make a Film Foundation. He also reprised his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in the fifth installment of the Pirates series, Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017). In the US, it was less popular with audiences than the previous installments, and Depp was nominated for two Golden Raspberry Awards for worst actor and for worst screen combo with "his worn-out drunk routine". However, the film had a good box office return internationally, especially in China, Japan and Russia. Depp's last film release in 2017 was the Agatha Christie adaptation Murder on the Orient Express, in which he was part of an ensemble cast led by director-star Kenneth Branagh.

In 2018, Depp voiced the title character Sherlock Gnomes in the animated movie Gnomeo & Juliet: Sherlock Gnomes. Although moderately commercially successful, it was critically panned and earned Depp two Golden Raspberry nominations, one for his acting and another for his "fast-fading film career". Depp then starred in two independent films, both produced by him and his company, Infinitum Nihil. The first was City of Lies, in which he starred as Russell Poole, an LAPD detective who attempts to solve the murders of rappers Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G. It was originally set for release in September 2015, but was pulled from the release schedule after a crew member sued Depp for assault. The second film was the comedy-drama Richard Says Goodbye, in which Depp played a professor with terminal cancer. It premiered at the Zurich Film Festival in October 2018. Depp's last film release of 2018 was Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, the sequel to Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, in which he reprised his role as Grindelwald. Depp's casting received criticism from fans of the series due to the domestic violence allegations against him. Depp also experienced other career setbacks around this time, as Disney confirmed that they would not be casting him in new Pirates installments and he was reported to no longer be attached to Universal's Dark Universe franchise. His only film release in 2019 was Waiting for the Barbarians, based on a novel by J.M. Coetzee.

Depp portrayed photographer W. Eugene Smith in the independent film drama Minamata, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in early 2020. Depp was set to return as Grindelwald in the untitled third Fantastic Beasts film,but stepped down after a request by Warner Bros. in November 2020, following his loss in a UK libel case that found allegations of domestic violence committed by him to be "substantially true". He was replaced by Mads Mikkelsen. Multiple news publications subsequently wrote that Depp's career was in crisis, with The Hollywood Reporter calling him a "persona non-grata" in the film industry.

In late November 2020, Depp received an award for his career at the Polish Camerimage film festival. Both Minamata and City of Lies were released in early 2021. By March 2021, an online petition to bring Depp back to the Pirates franchise, begun four months earlier, had reached its goal of 500,000 signatures.

Other ventures

In 2004, Depp founded film production company Infinitum Nihil to develop projects where he will serve as actor or producer. He serves as its CEO, while his sister, Christi Dembrowski, serves as president. The company's first two film releases were The Rum Diary (2011) and Hugo (2011).

Depp co-owned the nightclub The Viper Room in Los Angeles in 1993–2003, and the restaurant-bar Man Ray in Paris. Depp and Douglas Brinkley edited folk singer Woody Guthrie's novel House of Earth, which was published in 2013.

Music

Depp performing with Hollywood Vampires at Wembley Arena in June 2018

Prior to his acting career, Depp was a guitarist, and has later featured on songs by Oasis, Shane MacGowan, Iggy Pop, Vanessa Paradis, Aerosmith, Marilyn Manson, and The New Basement Tapes, among others. He also performed with Manson at the Revolver Golden Gods Awards in 2012. Depp played guitar on the soundtrack of his films Chocolat and Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and has appeared in music videos for Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, The Lemonheads, Avril Lavigne and Paul McCartney. In the 1990s, he was also a member of P, a musical group featuring Butthole Surfers singer Gibby Haynes, Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea and Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones.

In 2015, Depp formed the supergroup Hollywood Vampires with Alice Cooper and Joe Perry; the band also includes Bruce Witkin, his friend from his 1980s band, The Kids. Hollywood Vampires released their self-titled debut studio album in September 2015. It featured eleven classic rock covers, as well as three original songs (all co-written by Depp). The band made their live debut at The Roxy in Los Angeles in September 2015, and has since done two world tours in 2016 and 2018. Their second studio album, Rise, was released in June 2019 and consists mostly of original material, including songs written by Depp. The album also features a cover version of David Bowie's "Heroes", sung by Depp. In 2020, Depp released a cover of John Lennon's "Isolation" with guitarist Jeff Beck, and stated that they would be releasing more music together in the future.

Reception and public image

In the 1990s, Depp was seen as a new type of male film star that rejected the norms of that role. After becoming a teen idol in 21 Jump Street, he publicly protested against the image, and with his subsequent film and PR choices began to cultivate a new public persona. According to journalist Hadley Freeman, he was:

"Along with Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, he was part of a holy trinity of grunge heart-throbs. They were the opposite of the Beverly Hills 90210 boys, or Brad Pitt and DiCaprio, because they seemed embarrassed by their looks, even resentful of them. ... This uninterest in their own prettiness made them seem edgy, even while their prettiness softened that edge. They signified not just a different kind of celebrity, but a different kind of masculinity: desirable but gentle, manly but girlish. Depp in particular was the cool pinup it was safe to like, and the safe pinup it was cool to like. We fans understood that there was more to Depp, Phoenix and Reeves than handsomeness. They were artistic – they had bands! – and they thought really big thoughts, which they would ramble on about confusingly in interviews. If we dated them, we understood that our role would be to understand their souls."

Similarly, film scholar Anna Everett has described Depp's 1990s films and public persona as "anti-macho" and "gender-bending", going against the conventions of a Hollywood leading man. After 21 Jump Street, Depp chose to work in independent films, often taking on quirky roles that sometimes even completely obscured his looks, such as Edward Scissorhands. Critics often described Depp's characters as "iconic loners" or "gentle outsiders". According to Depp, his agent, Tracey Jacobs of the United Talent Agency (UTA), had to take "a lot of heat over the years" for his role choices; Depp characterized higher-ups at the UTA as thinking "Jesus Christ! When does he do a movie where he kisses the girl? When does he get to pull a gun out and shoot somebody? When does he get to be a [fucking] man for a change? When is he finally going to do a blockbuster?" Depp also cultivated the image of a bad boy. According to Everett, his "rule-breaking" roles matched with the "much publicized rebelliousness, unconventionality, and volatility ascribed to Depp's own personal life throughout the decade. From reports of his repeated confrontations with the police, trashing of a hotel room, chain smoking, drinking, and drug use, to his multiple engagements to such glamorous women as supermodel Kate Moss and Hollywood starlet Winona Ryder and others, we clearly see a perfect fit between his non-conformist star image and his repertoire of outsider characters."

After a decade of appearing mainly in independent films with varying commercial success, Depp became one of the biggest box office draws in the 2000s with his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in Walt Disney Studios' Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. The five films in the series have earned US$4.5 billion as of 2021. In addition to the Pirates franchise, Depp also made further four films with Tim Burton that were major successes, with one, Alice in Wonderland (2010), becoming the biggest commercial hit of Depp's career and one of the highest-grossing films in history (as of 2021).

According to film scholar Murray Pomerance, Depp's collaboration with Disney "can be seen to purport and herald a new era for Johnny Depp, one in which he is, finally, as though long-promised and long-expected, the proud proprietor of a much-accepted career; not only a star but a middle-class hero". In 2003, the same year as the first film in the Pirates series was released, Depp was named "World's Sexiest Man" by People; he would receive the title again in 2009. During the decade and into the 2010s, Depp was one of the biggest and most popular film stars in the world and was voted by the public as the Favorite Male Movie Star at the People's Choice Awards every year in 2005–2012. In 2012, Depp became the most highly paid actor in the American film industry, earning at best $75 million per film, and as of 2020, is the tenth highest-grossing actor worldwide, with his films having grossed over US$3.7 billion at the United States box office and over US$10 billion worldwide. Although a mainstream favorite with the audiences, critics' views on Depp changed in the 2000s, becoming more negative as he was seen to conform more to the Hollywood ideal. Regardless, Depp continued to eschew more traditional leading-man roles until towards the end of the 2000s, when he starred as John Dillinger in Public Enemies (2009).

In the 2010s, Depp's films have been less successful, with many big-budget studio films such as Dark Shadows (2012), The Lone Ranger (2013), and Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) underperforming at the box office and gaining Depp nominations at the Golden Raspberry Awards. Depp also received much negative publicity due to allegations of domestic violence, substance abuse, and poor on-set behavior as well as the loss of his US$650 million fortune. Disney, with whom Depp collaborated extensively in 2003–2017, has ended their association with him, and after losing a highly publicized libel trial against the publishers of The Sun, Depp was asked to resign from Warner Bros.' Fantastic Beasts franchise. Subsequently, many publications wrote that Depp would most likely struggle to find further work in major studio productions.

Personal life

Relationships

Depp and makeup artist Lori Anne Allison were married from 1983 until 1985. In the late 1980s, he was engaged to actresses Jennifer Grey and Sherilyn Fenn before proposing in 1990 to his Edward Scissorhands co-star Winona Ryder, for whom he tattooed "WINONA FOREVER" on his right arm. In 1994–1997, he was in a relationship with English model Kate Moss. Following his breakup from Moss, Depp began a relationship with French actress and singer Vanessa Paradis, whom he met while filming The Ninth Gate in France in 1998. They have two children, daughter Lily-Rose Melody Depp (born 1999) and son John Christopher "Jack" Depp III (born 2002). Depp stated that having children has given him "real foundation, a real strong place to stand in life, in work, in everything. ... You cannot plan the kind of deep love that results in children. Fatherhood was not a conscious decision. It was part of the wonderful ride I was on. It was destiny. All the math finally worked." Depp and Paradis announced that they had separated in June 2012.

Relationship with Amber Heard

Following the end of his relationship with Vanessa Paradis, Depp began dating actress Amber Heard, with whom he had co-starred in The Rum Diary (2011). They were married in a civil ceremony in February 2015. Heard filed for divorce in May 2016 and obtained a temporary restraining order against Depp, alleging in her court declaration that he had been verbally and physically abusive throughout their relationship, usually while under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Depp denied this and alleged that she was "attempting to secure a premature financial resolution". A settlement was reached in August 2016, and the divorce was finalized in January 2017. Heard dismissed the restraining order, and they issued a joint statement saying that their "relationship was intensely passionate and at times volatile, but always bound by love. Neither party has made false accusations for financial gain. There was never any intent of physical or emotional harm." Depp paid Heard a settlement of US$7 million, which she pledged to donate to the ACLU and the Children's Hospital Los Angeles.

In June 2018, Depp brought a libel lawsuit in the UK against News Group Newspapers (NGN), the company publishing the Sun, which had called him a "wife beater" in an April 2018 article.The case had a highly publicized trial in July 2020, with both Depp and Heard testifying for several days. In November 2020, the High Court of Justice ruled that 12 of the 14 incidents of violence claimed by Heard were ”substantially true”. The court rejected Depp's claim of a hoax and accepted that the allegations Heard had made against Depp "have had a negative effect on her career as an actor and activist". Following the verdict, Depp resigned from the role of Gellert Grindelwald in the Fantastic Beasts franchise, after being asked to do so by its production company, Warner Bros. Depp's appeal to overturn the verdict was rejected by the Court of Appeal in March 2021.

In early 2019, Depp sued Heard for defamation over an op-ed she wrote about her experiences of leaving an abusive relationship, which was published by the Washington Post in December 2018. Depp alleged that Heard had been the abuser and that her allegations constituted a hoax against him. Heard denied Depp's claims. The case is scheduled to go to trial in Fairfax County, Virginia in April 2022.

In August 2020, Heard countersued Depp, alleging that he had coordinated "a harassment campaign via Twitter and by orchestrating online petitions in an effort to get her fired from Aquaman and L'Oreal"

Alcohol and drug use

Depp has struggled with alcoholism and addiction for much of his life. He has stated that he began using drugs by taking his mother's "nerve pills" at the age of 11, was smoking at age 12 and by the age of 14 had used "every kind of drugs there were". In a 1997 interview, Depp acknowledged past abuse of alcohol during the filming of What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993). In a 2008 interview, Depp stated that he had "poisoned" himself with alcohol "for years". In 2013, Depp declared that he had stopped drinking alcohol, adding that he "pretty much got everything he could get out of it"; Depp also said, "I investigated wine and spirits thoroughly, and they certainly investigated me as well, and we found out that we got along beautifully, but maybe too well." Regarding his breakup with longtime partner Vanessa Paradis, Depp said that he "definitely wasn't going to rely on the drink to ease things or cushion the blow or cushion the situation...because that could have been fatal."

According to his ex-wife Amber Heard, Depp "plunged into the depths of paranoia and violence after bingeing on drugs and alcohol" during their relationship in 2013–2016. In a 2018 Rolling Stone profile of Depp, reporter Stephen Rodrick wrote that he had used hashish in his presence and described him as "alternately hilarious, sly and incoherent"; Depp also said that the allegation made by his former business managers that he had spent US$30,000 per month on wine was "insulting" because he had spent "far more" than that amount. During his 2020 libel trial, Depp admitted to having been addicted to Roxicodone and alcohol as well as used other substances such as MDMA and cocaine during his relationship with Heard.

Legal dealings

Depp was arrested in Vancouver in 1989 for assaulting a security guard after the police were called to end a loud party at his hotel room. He was also arrested in New York City in 1994 after causing significant damage to his room at The Mark Hotel, where he was staying with Kate Moss, his then-girlfriend. The charges were dropped against him after he agreed to pay US$9,767 in damages. Depp was arrested again in 1999 for brawling with paparazzi outside a restaurant while dining in London with Paradis.

In 2012, disabled UC Irvine medical professor Robin Eckert sued Depp and three security firms, claiming to have been attacked by his bodyguards at a concert in Los Angeles in 2011. During the incident, she was allegedly hand-cuffed and dragged 40 feet across the floor, resulting in injuries including a dislocated elbow. She argued in court that, as the security guards' direct manager, Depp failed to intervene, even though he did not actively take part in the battery. Before the case went to trial, Depp settled with Eckert for an undisclosed sum, according to TMZ.

In April 2015, Depp's then-wife Amber Heard breached Australia's biosecurity laws when she failed to declare her and Depp's two dogs to the customs when they flew into Queensland, where he was working on a film. Heard pleaded guilty to falsifying quarantine documents, stating that she had made a mistake due to sleep deprivation. She was placed on a $1,000 one-month good behavior bond for producing a false document; Heard and Depp also released a video in which they apologized for their behavior and urged people to adhere to the biosecurity laws. The Guardian called the case the "highest profile criminal quarantine case" in Australian history.

In March 2016, Depp cut ties with his management company, The Management Group (TMG), and sued them in January 2017 for allegedly improperly managing his money and leaving him over $40 million in debt. TMG stated that Depp was responsible for his own fiscal mismanagement and countersued him for unpaid fees. In a related suit, Depp also sued his lawyers, Bloom Hergott, in January 2017. Both lawsuits were settled, the former in 2018 and the latter in 2019.

In 2018, two of Depp's former bodyguards sued him for unpaid fees and unsafe working conditions. The suit was settled in 2019. Also in 2018, Depp was sued for allegedly hitting and verbally insulting a crew member while under the influence of alcohol on the set of City of Lies.

Political and religious views

Depp stated to the German magazine Stern in 2003 that "America is dumb, is something like a dumb puppy that has big teeth—that can bite and hurt you, aggressive." Although he later asserted that the magazine misquoted him and his words were taken out of context, Stern stood by its story, as did CNN.com in its coverage of the interview. CNN added his remark that he would like his children "to see America as a toy, a broken toy. Investigate it a little, check it out, get this feeling and then get out. "Depp has also disagreed with subsequent media reports that perceived him as a "European wannabe", saying that he liked the anonymity and simplicity of living in France while in a relationship with Paradis. Depp became a U.S. resident again in 2011, because France wanted him to become a permanent resident, which he said would require him to pay income tax in both countries.

In November 2016, Depp joined the campaign Imprisoned for Art to call for the release of Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, who was being held in custody in Russia.

At the Glastonbury Festival 2017, Depp publicly asked: "When was the last time an actor assassinated a President? I want to clarify: I'm not an actor. I lie for a living. However, it's been a while and maybe it's time ... not insinuating anything". The comment seemed to reference John Wilkes Booth, the actor who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Shawn Holtzclaw of the Secret Service told CNN that they were "aware" of Depp's comment, but said: "For security reasons, we cannot discuss specifically nor in general terms the means and methods of how we perform our protective responsibilities". The next day, Depp apologized for making these remarks, saying: "It did not come out as intended, and I intended no malice. I was only trying to amuse, not to harm anyone."