Amber Heard says she is happy to have moved on with her life
LOS ANGELES — Actress Amber Heard has a movie coming out this weekend that will be new to theaters and mass audiences, but for her it's actually quite old.
"London Fields," an adaptation of a 1989 Martin Amis mystery, has been in some stage of development for almost 20 years. Heard didn't get involved until 2013, with music video director Matthew Cullen at the helm, but the roadblocks and behind the scenes drama had only just begun.
The film was abruptly pulled from the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015 (after some critics had already seen it) when Cullen sued the producers over a dispute about payment and the final cut, which set off a string of countersuits. Producers even sued Heard for $10 million, which she countered with a suit that claimed the production had violated her nudity agreement by using a body double.
It would take until September, five years after cameras started rolling, for the producers to settle, and now the film is finally preparing to debut this weekend in 600 theaters.
"Can you imagine what it would be like for you to talk about an article that you wrote or a piece you did five years ago?" Heard, 32, said, laughing via phone from London this week.
She can barely relate to the person who did this a half decade ago, when she was in her 20s and newly married to her now ex-husband Johnny Depp, who has a small role in the film.
"All of those factors have changed," she said. "It's been so long."
She can't quite recall which version she's last seen of the movie which co-stars Billy Bob Thornton, Theo James and Jim Sturgess, although she does still find her character Nicola Six interesting.
"You can make different cases for her being empowered or disempowered," Heard said of the clairvoyant femme fatale who's also trapped by an idea that, "death is preferable to the decline of youthful female sexuality."
Overall, Heard is happy that "London Fields" is finally coming out and says that the issues that have kept it out of theaters "are behind us now," but that she would have been, "Much happier had the film come out three years ago."
She said it was "unfortunate" AP FILE PHOTO and "very wrong" that she was sued and is glad that they were able to settle and that she ultimately didn't have to pay any money.
"But it's very important for a female actress or any woman to be able to exercise her own control over her own body and her image," Heard added. "I'm glad that the version of the movie being released is supposedly respectful ... with regards specifically to nudity and my nudity agreement. But again, those issues are in the past."
"In the past" is a phrase that Heard repeats often and the release of "London Fields" helps to close a chapter in her life, and allows her to focus on the future, her humanitarian work and the December release of her most highprofile film to date, the DC comic book movie "Aquaman" in which she stars opposite Jason Momoa as Mera, a sea queen with Little Mermaid-red hair (she was introduced in a small appearance in "Justice League").