Johnny Depp said he felt betrayed after being dropped by the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise, telling the court that he wanted to give it a ‘proper goodbye’.
The 58-year-old star returned to the stand on Monday (25 April) to give testimony at his defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard, 35.
Depp is seeking $50 million (£38.2 million) in damages for a 2018 op-ed Heard wrote for The Washington Post in which she referred to herself as a survivor of domestic abuse.
While Heard didn’t outright name Depp in the piece, his lawyers are arguing that the allegations have permanently damaged his professional reputation and his career suffered as a result, with recent discussions focusing on his removal from the Disney film franchise.
Depp alleges that he was dropped as Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies following Heard’s allegations, which he previously described as ‘heinous’, ‘disturbing’ and ‘not based in any species of truth’.
In his latest testimony given at Fairfax County Court, Depp took the stand for a redirect with one of his attorneys, Jessica Meyers, where he discussed reading an article in which Disney’s Sean Bailey suggested they’d be continuing the franchise without him just a couple of days after Heard’s op-ed.
When Meyers asked him how it felt finding out he was being dropped from the role, he said: “Captain Jack Sparrow was a character that I had built from the ground up and was something that I, of course, put a lot of myself into the character.
“And also having worked on these films with these people and having added much of myself, much of my own re-writing of the dialogue… I didn’t quite understand how, after that long relationship and quite a successful relationship, certainly for Disney, that suddenly I was guilty until proven innocent.”
Speaking about what his intentions were for future Pirates films, Depp said: “My feeling was that these characters should be able to have their proper goodbye, as it were.
“A franchise can only last for so long, and there’s a way to end a franchise like that and I thought that the characters deserved to have their way out, to end the franchise on a very good note.
“I planned on continuing until it was time to stop.”
Meyers then highlighted a quote brought up while Depp was under cross-examination from Heard’s attorney in which he said he ‘wouldn’t return to the franchise for $300 million and a million alpacas’.
Depp smirked before explaining: “Long before I made the statement, there was a very deep and distinct sense of having been betrayed by the people that I had been working with, the people I had worked hard for, the people I had delivered a character to that they initially despised.”
He added that he believed he made the comment during a press conference in 2021, three years after the 2018 op-ed.
