Is Depp’s career reaching it’s end?
As his PR liability rating creeps higher, we wonder why he’s still nabbing lucrative jobs
The most interesting thing about Johnny Depp’s performance in the new Fantastic Beasts film — arguably the only interesting thing — is that he is actually there to give it in the first place. Two years ago, audiences who saw the first instalment in JK Rowling’s fantasy series were bowled a googly just before the closing credits, when the villain of the piece — a scheming magical enforcer called Percival Graves, played by Colin Farrell — unexpectedly morphed into a platinum-haired and pudgyfaced Depp. The actor’s cameo appearance as Gellert Grindelwald, public enemy number one in the Wizarding World, had been kept secret — but for many of us, the surprise went off with less of a bang than a plop.
Farrell had made a suave baddy — the kind whose path through the next four proposed films might make all sorts of intriguing turns. But now the prospect of eight to 10 hours of oddball shtick loomed instead.
What’s more, six months earlier, Depp had been accused of domestic abuse by his now-ex wife, the actress Amber Heard — which he has strenuously denied — and their subsequent divorce had been one of the most bitter in recent Hollywood memory. There had also been whispers of unpredictable behaviour on the set of the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film — later extensively fleshed out by crew members — that suggested the now 55-year-old actor’s
craft was not as laser-focused as it might have been.
Even at that relatively late stage in mid-2016, Depp could have been easily and quietly Kevin Spacey-ed out of the picture. Nothing about the role of Grindelwald — a proto-fascist agitator whipping up antimuggle sentiment in the Thirties — suggested Depp was the only man who could play him.
Also, no one knew he was actually in it. In a statement, Rowling admitted she and the director David Yates had discussed recasting, but said that based on their understanding of the circumstances, they were “not only comfortable sticking with our original casting, but genuinely happy to have Johnny playing a major character in the movies”, before adding, a little spikily, that “conscience isn’t governable by committee”.
In other words, a reckoning had been made at Warner Bros, and had concluded that Depp would remain a viable star and a net asset until 2024 at least.
There is no mystery around why Depp should want to secure another prominent, and therefore well-paid, recurring role. A legal spat with his former business managers last year shed light on a lavish lifestyle that reportedly cost the actor an average of $2 million (Dh7.34 million) per month, including a wine tab of $30,000 and a lump-sum payment to fire his late friend Hunter S Thompson’s ashes into space from a cannon. (“It’s insulting to say that I spent $30,000 on wine, because it was far more,” he clarified in a Rolling Stone interview, in which he also estimated that the cost of Thompson’s extraterrestrial commit- tal at $5 million.) His personal spending was presumably only able to hit such heights thanks to the Pirates franchise, which transformed Depp from Gen X heart-throb to global megastar in 2003. So what else has the present decade yielded? Half-formed vanity projects (The Rum Diary), wacko-goth diminishing returns (Dark Shadows, Alice Through the Looking Glass), glorified cameos (Into the Woods, Lucky Them) and abominations (Mortdecai). There were also two box office bombs, The Lone Ranger and Transcendence. Somehow, Rowling and Warner Bros reconciled with making Depp a linchpin of their expensive new venture. But at a time when audiences are lining up for familiar characters and worlds rather than stars, that’s a hard gamble to rationalise. Perhaps they are banking on international audiences just not caring that much about Depp’s travails.