The Mad Hatter world of Johnny and Amber
Iremember interviewing Johnny Depp for Xposé in a lush five star hotel in London in 2016 for his role as the Mad Hatter in Alice Through
the Looking Glass. I could hardly get a word out of him, director Tim Burton did most of the talking and I nodded with ever reddening cheeks, aware ‘the talent’ had wafted off into a mental tea party with two minutes to spare before my time was up. It didn’t help that I was wearing a lamb. Pre-vegan days folks, but I was acutely aware of my treachery in my soft, snow white, boiling shearling gilet. I didn’t think Johnny was the talkative type. Or maybe I wasn’t the celeb interviewer type. One or the other. Probably both.
Now Johnny is going to have to talk, to defend his kooky name in London’s Royal Courts of Justice in a libel action against The
Sun for a 2018 headline that alleged he was a ‘wife beater’, a claim Depp strenuously denies. For someone not known for sharing his interior world, the details of his ill-fated, two-year marriage to actress Amber Heard make you understand why he remained the silent type all these years. Pure Alice in
Wonderland bonkers, a tale that gets curiouser and curiouser by the day.
The pair consensually agreed to taperecorded conversations to try to catch the other out afterwards such was their distrust of each other’s version of events. What? We should NOT know this. Why weren’t the tapes destroyed afterwards? Now ex-wife Vanessa Paradis and ex-girlfriend Winona Ryder are being called as character witnesses. I can’t wait to see ’90s cool girl Winona again. The ‘I believe her’ mantra we hear so often on social media is problematic in this case. Seemingly there’s a queue of people, including the female of the species, who find Amber Heard an unlikely ‘victim’. Did she hit Johnny first, as he says, or did he hit her, as she alleges? And who the hell pooped on Johnny’s bed? Did Amber have affairs with Elon Musk and James Franco?
How are we supposed to mind our own business with this kind of information spilling out of the court daily? In a written statement, Depp’s lawyer David Sherborne describes Heard: ‘She is a highly complex and aggressive individual who suffered extreme mood swings, would provoke endless circular arguments and fly into violent rages.’ Clearly these two were a mismatch made in mid-life crisis whirr, most certainly not helped by Johnny Depp’s drink and drug problem. The star told the court he has been using drugs since the age of 11 to numb the pain of an unstable childhood and that he had asked his assistant to find him some ‘happy pills’ and ‘whitey stuff’ while in Australia, that time the couple apologised for smuggling their dogs into the country without proper documentation. The trial will focus on 14 separate allegations of domestic abuse from early 2013 to May 2016. Will there be any winners out of this trial apart from the lawyers who’ll no doubt have a Cheshire Cat grin by the end of proceedings? Here we go down the rabbit hole to find out.
The tale of their relationship gets curiouser and curiouser