OPINION:
In the Hollywood version of the Johnny Depp trial, we all know how things would pan out.
A fallen heartthrob stands accused of domestic violence by a glamorous young blonde on the make. And now ruin surely awaits … unless a last-ditch attempt to clear his name pays off.
It's a quintessential film noir scenario, and decades of thrillers have trained us to side with the dishevelled anti-hero, and to regard with extreme suspicion the femme fatale circling overhead.
But real life, as we're often reminded, can have very little in common with the movies.
On Monday morning (Tuesday NZT), reality furnished Depp's blockbuster libel case against The Sun newspaper with perhaps the least Hollywood ending imaginable.
In a 129-page ruling, Justice Nicol dismissed the 57-year-old Pirates of the Caribbean star's claim, and described the contentious April 2018 article which referred to him as a "wife beater" as "substantially true".
Dismissing the "recurring theme" in Depp's evidence that Amber Heard's claims were an opportunistic "hoax" contrived by a "gold-digger" – a sturdy noir trope, if ever there was one – the judgement found that "the great majority of alleged assaults of Ms Heard by Mr Depp have been proved to the civil standard".
Justice Nicol also accepted that the 34-year-old Heard's own career had been negatively affected by her allegations, after an online harassment campaign petitioned to have her removed from future film roles, commercial tie-ups, and humanitarian initiatives.
In other words, so much for the Roxie Hart career model: a protracted and scandalous court case is not, in fact, a fast-track to the show-business A-list, whatever the musical Chicago might have suggested.
(One hopes that Heard's career can now resume unimpeded, though the fact that the hashtag "#JusticeForJohnnyDepp" was trending on Twitter all day suggests the social-media noise may not abate for a while yet.)
Within a couple of hours of the judgement's publication, Depp's lawyers announced he would be filing an appeal – and the actor is already working on a sequel of sorts, in the form of a separate US libel action which is scheduled to be heard in a Virginia court in May 2021. But as far as this particular chapter of the whole lurid saga is concerned, the credits have now decisively rolled.
After arguably the highest-profile libel trial of the century – an epic, 16-day airing of dirty laundry at the High Court in London, during which Depp himself admitted taking "industrial quantities" of class-A substances and the couple's turbulent, 15-month marriage was picked over in excruciating detail – the actor's name lies indelibly blackened, and his professional prospects in tatters.
A legal action that must have once seemed like a humiliating but necessary evil now looks like the most ill-advised career move since Mortdecai.
What happens next? Depp and his team will probably draw succour from the case of Mel Gibson, who pleaded no contest to a domestic-violence charge in 2011 but has worked fairly consistently, if not always discerningly, ever since.
Post #MeToo, though, the likelier path is surely the one recently trodden by Kevin Spacey, who three years ago was excommunicated at light speed from the industry at large, following a number of allegations of sexual misconduct.
Filming was suspended on the final season of House of Cards, which was then rewritten to remove him – no matter that he played the central character – while his already-shot Gore Vidal biopic was canned.
Most strikingly of all, his role in Ridley Scott's All The Money in the World was reshot by Christopher Plummer in a little over a week, with the film still opening on its scheduled release date less than a month after that.
Unlike Spacey, however, Depp hasn't been especially busy of late. His standing as a leading man was on the slide long before Heard spoke out, with public fatigue seeming to set in seven or eight years ago, between the release of Dark Shadows and The Lone Ranger.
These two high-profile flops – from Tim Burton and Gore Verbinski, no less; the very filmmakers who made him a star in the first place – seemed to indicate that Depp's once enormously bankable gothic and swashbuckling screen personas had long passed their sell-by dates.
Of his recent work, only one completed film has yet to be released: Minamata, a biopic of the photographer Eugene Smith, currently scheduled for release next February. But there is one significantly costlier undertaking, still under way, which this morning's verdict will have thrown into uproar.
I mean Warner Bros' Fantastic Beasts franchise, the hitherto lucrative Harry Potter spin-off series in which Depp plays the villain, a kind of bleached-blond proto-Voldemort called Gellert Grindelwald.
When Depp made his surprise appearance at the climax of the first, 2016-released instalment, it was only months after Heard had filed for divorce and a temporary restraining order at an LA court, with a conspicuously bruised right cheek.
Asked to comment at the time on the decision to press ahead with Depp in a pivotal role, director David Yates framed the allegations as a blip to be weathered. "You're brilliant one week, people are saying odd things the next, you go up and down," he told The Leaky Cauldron, a Potter fan site. "But no one takes away your pure talent."
Meanwhile, JK Rowling herself later implied the full story had yet to come out, saying in a 2017 statement that she and the studio were "genuinely happy to have Johnny playing a major character in the movies".
Presumably they're a little less enraptured now. After a pandemic-related six-month delay, filming on the third instalment of Fantastic Beasts got under way in early September, with Depp joining the production two weeks ago in London.
But with its proposed release still a year away – and eminently postponable, thanks to Covid congestion – recasting and reshooting is now the only tenable route forward.
Depp's status as a domestic abuser has now been loudly established in the public square – and at a cultural moment at which commercial support of a film is increasingly regarded by consumers as a moral endorsement of its makers.
We're a long way from 1965, when Sean Connery could tell an interviewer "I don't think there's anything wrong with hitting a woman" while promoting Thunderball, only for his career to power on unscathed.
It also seems unlikely that Depp's castmates' representatives are relishing the prospect of an international press tour on which their clients will be repeatedly expected to answer for – or at the very least pass comment on – their co-star's offences.
A catastrophic libel trial is one thing. But a communal PR nightmare? He'll never work in this town again.
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