Depp says the reason he wanted to go to trial (and was willing to “semi-eviscerate” himself) was because “Everyone was saying, ‘It’ll go away!’ But I can’t trust that. What will go away? The fiction pawned around the [fucking] 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 memorise lines, if you’re just speaking the truth? Roll the dice.”
Depp goes on to suggest his troubled relationship with Heard was a reflection of the troubled relationship between his own parents, which he implies was violent. However, he says “it would be dumb for me to carry any bitterness” towards his ex-wife: “Eternal hatred? You want to put curses on someone? No,” he says. (In 2013, Depp texted Paul Bettany saying he wanted to “burn Amber,” adding, “Let’s drown her before we burn her!!! I will fuck her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she’s dead.” He later said these were jokes inspired by Monty Python.) “I know who I am, what that was and, look, it was a learning experience,” Depp goes on to say, insisting he has “no regrets about anything.”
No bitterness, but Depp does still sound upset that his agent of 30 years testified in court that certain productions were reluctant to hire Johnny Depp because of his chronic lateness. Depp doesn’t exactly refute his reputation for being “difficult” (his alleged tendency to hold up production on Pirates Of The Caribbean 5 was well-documented), but he does complain about his own stalwart loyalty not being reciprocated. “That’s death by confetti, these fake [motherfuckers] who lie to you, celebrate you, say all sorts of horror behind your back, yet keep the money—that confetti machine going—because what do they want? Dough,” he says.
“I’ll tell you what hurts. There are people, and I’m thinking of three, who did me dirty. Those people were at my kids’ parties. Throwing them in the air. And, look, I understand people who could not stand up [for me], because the most frightening thing to them was making the right choice. I was pre-MeToo. I was like a crash test dummy for MeToo. It was before Harvey Weinstein,” Depp continues. “And I sponged it, took it all in. And so I wanted from the hundreds of people I’ve met in that industry to see who was playing it safe.” Given the amount of people who have supported him—the likes of Al Pacino, Winona Ryder, Alice Cooper, Tim Burton, and more— it seems pretty safe to be on Depp’s side, even in the wake of allegations that were proven “substantially true” in one court of law.
