Johnny Depp Opens Up About Warner Bros. Replacing Him With Mads Mikkelsen In ‘Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore’: “They Wanted Me To Retire,” He Said “F–k You”
Johnny Depp is finally addressing what he felt when Warner Bros. let him go from the last Fantastic Beasts movie, after he participated in the first two, amid the trials and tribulations of his relationship and feud with Amber Heard and the #MeToo movement.
It all happened in the blink of an eye once Depp lost a libel suit against The Sun in the UK, which called him a “wife-beater” in an exposé. “It literally stopped in a millisecond, like, while I was doing the movie. They said we’d like you to resign. But what was really in my head was they wanted me to retire,” he recalled in The Telegraph.
Depp added he was “shunned, dumped, booted, deep-sixed, canceled” or “however you want to define it,” after Warner made their decision, which he reacted to viscerally inside. “F–k you. There’s far too many of me to kill. If you think you can hurt me more than I’ve already been hurt you’re gravely mistaken,” he said.
The actor was briefly an item with Heard, but their marriage was tempestuous. They separated, and he sued her for defamation after she wrote a Washington Times op-ed painting herself as an abuse victim. Recordings of private arguments displayed otherwise, and Depp would win the case.
His personal life was plastered all over the 24-hour news cycle, but it was more important to him to fight back. “I knew I’d have to semi-eviscerate myself. Everyone was saying, ‘It’ll go away!’ But I can’t trust that,” Depp said recently to The Sunday Times.
“What will go away? The fiction pawned around the f–ing globe? No it won’t. If I don’t try to represent the truth it will be like I’ve actually committed the acts I am accused of. And my kids will have to live with it. Their kids. Kids that I’ve met in hospitals. So the night before the trial in Virginia I didn’t feel nervous. If you don’t have to memorize lines, if you’re just speaking the truth? Roll the dice,” he continued.
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Having survived “all the hit pieces” and the BS, Depp further added: “Look, none of this was going be easy, but I didn’t care. I thought, ‘I’ll fight until the bitter f–ing end.’ And if I end up pumping gas? That’s all right. I’ve done that before.” His career is in recovery, but he lost his Fantastic Beasts gig to Mads Mikkelsen.
The real cruel irony was two-fold: one, Warner Bros. sided with Amber Heard and kept her on board Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom, even as her story and reputation were falling apart in real time. It was the height of #MeToo and #TimesUp fervor and Warner’s CEO was a woman, Ann Sarnoff. The decision to dump Depp might not have been hers ultimately, but her tenure is a relevant coincidence.
Second, and worse, they also refused to fire Fantastic Beasts star Ezra Miller despite the actor’s mounting arrests and scandals that brought bad publicity to both The Secrets of Dumbledore and The Flash. Each film tanked and Warner’s protection of bad apples didn’t help their fortunes.
