‘Match made in hell’: Unpacking Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s corrosive relationship

POP CULTURE
Hollywood Vampires: Johnny Depp, Amber Heard and the Celebrity Exploitation Machine
Kelly Loudenberg and Makiko Wholey
HarperCollins, $37.99

In recent years, two highly-publicised court trials have considered whether actor Johnny Depp was defamed in the media. Only one court found he was – and not in the way many expected.

In 2018, British tabloid newspaper The Sun published an article that called the 62-year-old a “wife beater”, owing to allegations made by ex-wife Amber Heard that he had physically assaulted her. That same year, Heard penned an opinion piece for The Washington Post that never mentioned Depp’s name but included this line: “I became a public figure representing domestic abuse”.

Depp first sued the newspaper for libel in the UK before later suing Heard in the US. In the end, the separate rulings found Depp wasn’t defamed by the British newspaper article but – in a surprise to many – was by Heard’s op-ed.

Hollywood Vampires is an attempt to chronicle one corrosive celebrity relationship and the explosive court cases that animated the zeitgeist. Investigative journalists Kelly Loudenberg and Makiko Wholey – who covered the trial in real time and had access to both camps – meticulously piece together its many complicated parts in a retelling that stresses nuance over accusation.

Depp first met Heard in 2008 during casting for his movie The Rum Diary and an intoxicating romance quickly engulfed the two. Many friends were sceptical of the relationship – some even thought the pair “were a match made in hell” – as destructive habits emerged involving alcohol and drugs. A hasty marriage only fuelled their “poisonous cycle” as Depp and Heard began “emotionally tortur[ing]” each other while indulging in dissolution.

The relationship reached a nadir in a series of well-publicised episodes, all recounted in extensive detail here: Depp’s finger was severed in a drunken melee; faeces was found in their bed (with Depp accusing Heard of the act); Heard allegedly extinguished a cigarette on Depp and Depp allegedly assaulted Heard with a glass bottle. An acrimonious split soon followed, with Heard’s claims of abuse published in several celebrity outlets, before a divorce was quickly finalised in 2016.

Loudenberg and Wholey say Heard’s allegations of domestic violence made her “poised for the moment” against the public #MeToo reckoning. Her op-ed helped align her name with the wider Hollywood gender movement, joining other famous women speaking out against harassment and abuse. The piece also saw Heard acknowledge her marital mistreatment indirectly as a broad confidentiality agreement applied at the end of their marriage. To her ex-husband, this article was the “proverbial nail in the coffin”.

With the public mostly at home thanks to the pandemic, the US trial against Heard attracted so many because it represented a court battle litigating issues much greater than just defamation. “With Depp vs Heard … what began as a salacious celebrity divorce grew into a national occupation, one that created a cultural schism and raised controversial questions,” Loudenberg and Wholey write.

Hollywood Vampires doesn’t re-deliberate the questions posed by the trials but stresses the difficulty with taking a cut-and-dry view of this opaque legal, political, celebrity – and very human – ordeal. Where the journalists most excel is analysing the Hollywood status of the saga, demonstrating how these two stars “represent[ed] complex social problems” that so captivated public because of the charged political concerns each one came to embody or advocate.

The salacious specifics found elsewhere, however, seem complicit in the “vampiric” culture the book so condemns. Many tawdry details are included that erode the political thrust of its “goal to complicate simplistic narratives and convenient assumptions that have come to surround the Depp vs Heard controversy”. In particular, the poo-in-bed episode is especially drawn out, with unnecessary commentary included such as this: “Johnny was … just obsessed … by the poop. He kept a colour-corrected picture of it on his phone”.

By the end of Hollywood Vampires, the historical record of this turbulent celebrity epic, may be less murky and the political ramifications of the trials much sharper. But the book’s critique of the “celebrity exploitation machine” – one fuelled by new and old media, money and power – proves less compelling when so much luridness is indulged in.

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