Sunday Star-Times

Defensive Depp digs a deeper hole

Actor’s bizarre Rolling Stone interview does little to repair his reputation as a big spender – and includes some surprising revelation­s.

- USA Today, The Times

I was as low as I believe I could have gotten . . . I kept trying to figure out what I’d done to deserve this.

Johnny Depp

Johnny Depp gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine – and it’s

every bit as bonkers as you might expect.

In the story, published this week, reporter Stephen Roderick said it had taken 200 emails to get in a room with Depp, who brought him to his London home and indicated he was ready to ‘‘bare his soul about his empty bank accounts’’.

The Hollywood star, 55, is locked in a legal battle with his former business managers over his dwindling fortune. Last year, he sued The Management Group (TMG) for US$25 million (NZ$36m), alleging the company mismanaged nearly US$400m through fees he didn’t agree to, incurring late fees via delinquent income tax filings, and making loans to themselves and members of his entourage that he didn’t approve.

TMG promptly countersue­d, saying Depp frittered away his money on extravagan­ces and ignored their warnings that he couldn’t afford to keep spending at that pace.

If his intention for the interview (arranged by Depp’s lawyer, Adam Waldman, an American consultant with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin) was to counteract the notion that he’s out of touch with reality or knock down the reports of his outlandish spending – including US$30,000 a month on wine, 14 pieces of real estate, an US$18m yacht and 45 luxury cars – it’s not clear whether he succeeded. He may have actually made his situation worse.

In a soul-baring interview conducted over three drink- and drugfuelle­d days and nights at a rented mansion in Highgate, north London, the Pirates of the

Caribbean star succeeded in portraying himself as lonely, confused and sadly debauched, boasting about his spending even as he railed against his ‘‘betrayal’’ by TMG.

During the interview, he never appeared during daylight hours, he smoked joints rolled from a pile of hashish on the dining room table.

Here are a few of the most notable revelation­s from the story: He’s blown through nearly US$650 million: The Rolling Stone story estimates that over the course of his 30-year movie career, Depp’s films have made US$3.6 billion in profits. He’s been paid approximat­ely US$650m. And it’s almost all gone. Depp had no idea he was behind on his taxes: ‘‘I just had no clue,’’ the actor told Roderick, who observed that the tax discussion was ‘‘one of the few moments when he looked genuinely worried’’ about his financial situation.

He accused TMG of paying his taxes late for 13 consecutiv­e years, thereby incurring US$6m in late

fees: Depp continued: ‘‘If you’re knowingly not paying the United States Government taxes, somebody is gonna (expletive) catch up with you and hand you a bill, and you’ll probably go to the pokey.’’

Miriam Fisher, a tax lawyer brought in by the actor’s business managers to navigate a way out of the tax problems, sided with Depp on this issue. She told the magazine: ‘‘TMG had a lot of options, and they chose the worse one: make the IRS your creditor.’’

His accountant­s actually lowballed some of his most extravagan­t expenses: ‘‘It’s insulting to say that I spent US$30,000 on wine,’’ says

Depp of one of the more wasteful expenditur­es noted in the TMG lawsuit. ‘‘Because it was far more.’’

The same goes for the rocket he used to launch the ashes of his idol, Hunter S Thompson, into the sky exactly 30cm higher than the Statue of Liberty.

‘‘By the way, it was not US$3 million to shoot Hunter into the (expletive) sky,’’ he noted. ‘‘It was US$5 million.’’

He says the spring of 2016 was ‘‘the lowest I believe I could have

gotten’’: Depp says he entered a period of ‘‘acute depression’’ following the public airing of his finances and the one-two punch of ex-wife Amber Heard accusing him of physical abuse and filing for divorce the night before his mother’s funeral in May 2016.

The couple reached a divorce settlement that August, and signed a non-disclosure agreement, which Depp cited as his reason for not discussing Heard directly. (Rodrick notes that Depp married her without a prenuptial agreement, against the advice of his inner circle.)

‘‘I was as low as I believe I could have gotten,’’ he says grimly of his life in 2016. ‘‘The next step was, ‘You’re going to arrive somewhere with your eyes open and you’re going to leave there with your eyes closed’. I couldn’t take the pain every day.’’

Depp says he coped by composing his memoir on a manual typewriter, Hunter S Thompson-style.

‘‘I poured myself a vodka in the morning and started writing until the tears filled my eyes and I couldn’t see the page any more,’’ he says.

‘‘I kept trying to figure out what I’d done to deserve this. I’d tried being kind to everyone, helping everyone, being truthful to everyone.

‘‘The truth is most important to me. And all this still happened.’’

He says it was TMG’s job to scold his Kentucky relatives about

their spending: Depp continues to pay to maintain the Kentucky horse farm he bought his mother in the 1980s, despite the fact that she died in 2016. He says one of his sisters lives there with her husband and son, all of whom are on his payroll.

They spent so much that when Depp requested a breakdown of their expenses from financial manager Joel Mandel, the document ran to 200 pages.

‘‘Their thinking is that I’m going to take care of them forever and that the farm is now theirs,’’ he says. ‘‘I didn’t make that promise.’’

Asked why he didn’t tell them to stop spending or even cut them off, he told Rodrick: ‘‘That’s why I’m paying (TMG).’’

Mandel told Rodrick he would have been delighted to cut them off, but that Depp would never give him the green light to actually do it.

He didn’t sell his St Tropez estate after a tearful phone call

from his daughter: In 2015, Mandel told Depp that in order to cover loans that were coming due, he would need to do two movies and sell his French property near St Tropez, which he’d shared with former partner Vanessa Paradis and their two children, Lily-Rose and Jack.

Depp was initially open to the idea of selling Hameau, but ruled it out after Lily-Rose called him crying, begging him not to sell her childhood home.

Depp continued to waver on selling. Instead of cutting the price in the hope of a quick sale, Rodrick writes, he kept raising it from its original price of US$13m to US$27m. At one point late in 2016,

Variety put the price at US$63m. Depp never did sell it, or any of his other properties.

By January 2016, things were so bad that Mandel informed Depp’s employees that they couldn’t even buy house plants. Depp fired TMG two months later.

He confirms that a sound engineer fed him lines through an earpiece: Asked about an allegation in TMG’s lawsuit that claimed

Depp had lines fed to him through an earpiece on movie sets, Depp said it wasn’t just for lines. A sound engineer also played him sound effects, which he said heightened his performanc­e.

‘‘I’ve got bagpipes, a baby crying and bombs going off. It creates a truth. Some of my biggest heroes were in silent film,’’ he explained.

‘‘It had to be behind the eyes. And my feeling is, that if there’s no truth behind the eyes, doesn’t matter what the (expletive) words are.’’ He’s sorry quaaludes went out of style: Depp expressed remorse that that the prescripti­on sedative isn’t as available for recreation­al use as it was once. The drug was taken off the market in 1985 but remained popular until the 1990s, and was allegedly used by Bill Cosby to subdue accuser Andrea Constand in the incident that led to his conviction.

Why was he such a fan? ‘‘They’re made with just a little bit of arsenic, or strychnine, so the high was far more immediate,’’ he told the magazine, adding that when he took quaaludes, ‘‘you either wanted to smile and just be happy with your pals, or (expletive), or fight’’.

He would have used LSD instead of Seal Team Six on Osama bin Laden: ‘‘You get a bunch of (expletive) planes, big (expletive) planes that spray (expletive), and you drop LSD-25,’’ he says. ‘‘You saturate the (expletive) place. Every single thing will walk out of their cave smiling, happy.’’

He once roomed with a bank robber and gave his roommates

scabies: Depp recalled coming home from a cheap hotel to the flophouse he shared with roommates during his early days in Los Angeles. Within hours he said, everyone was scratching themselves furiously. After shaving his body, he found the culprit: mites.

‘‘I gave everyone scabies,’’ Depp said. ‘‘You know how hard it is to tell your roommates that?’’

On the upside, he noted: ‘‘My roommate couldn’t say much. He was a bank robber.’’

Depp and Waldman, according to the magazine, believe that their case will change Hollywood business practices.

‘‘No-one challenges the monster of Hollywood and survives,’’ Waldman said. ‘‘Everyone is too afraid. Johnny’s not afraid.’’

 ?? WALT DISNEY PICTURES ?? The Pirates of the Caribbean movies have helped Johnny Depp earn an estimated US$650 million over the course of his career – and it’s almost all gone. Depp is battling his former business managers over his dwindling fortune, but says it is ‘‘insulting’’ to claim that he spent less than he actually did.
WALT DISNEY PICTURES The Pirates of the Caribbean movies have helped Johnny Depp earn an estimated US$650 million over the course of his career – and it’s almost all gone. Depp is battling his former business managers over his dwindling fortune, but says it is ‘‘insulting’’ to claim that he spent less than he actually did.

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