When Johnny Depp exited the Fantastic Beasts franchise on November 6th, 2020, it was a seemingly fatal blow to his Hollywood career. Only days earlier, he had lost a heavily publicised libel battle against The Sun newspaper, which had accused him of beating then-wife Amber Heard. He revealed that Warner Brothers had asked him to resign from the film but resolved to prove the allegations against him were false. Then he said sayonara to Hollywood and has only appeared in foreign-made indie films since.
In 2021, Depp indicated in an interview that he felt he was the victim of cancel culture and that Hollywood had boycotted him. Two years later, Depp appeared at a Cannes Film Festival press conference to discuss Jeanne du Barry, a film he made in France in which he played King Louis XV. He was asked if he still felt Hollywood was boycotting him and gave a customarily rambling answer that only made a vague kind of sense.
The fallen star answered: “Did I feel a boycott by Hollywood? Well, you’d have to not have a pulse to feel at that point, ‘None of this is happening; it’s just a weird joke, or I have been asleep for 35 years’. Of course, when you’re asked to resign from a film you’re doing because of something that is merely a bunch of kind of vowels and consonants floating in the air, you feel a boycott.”
However, Depp then claimed that, while he may have felt boycotted in 2021, he didn’t feel it two years later. Why? Because he didn’t think about Hollywood anymore. Using this logic, he figured he couldn’t be boycotted by that system — because he wouldn’t return even if asked to. He mused: “I don’t have much further need for Hollywood myself. I think it’s a very strange, funny time where everybody wants to be themselves, but they can’t; they must fall in line and conform, and if you want to lead this life, I’ll be on the other side.”
As for whether he considered Jeanne du Barry – a movie he made far away from the Hollywood system – a comeback, Depp scoffed at the idea. In fact, he took a page out of Nicolas Cage’s fictional alter-ego, Nick Cage, in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and simply said he never left. He mused, “I keep wondering about the word ‘comeback’ because I didn’t go anywhere. As a matter of fact, I live about 45 minutes away. Maybe people stopped calling. I don’t know what their fear was at the time.”
It was all very navel-gazing, “woe was me” stuff from a man who felt he’d been wronged by Hollywood and by the media as a whole. At one point, he even said that the majority of what has been written about his and Heard’s life had been a “fantastically, horrifically written fiction”. Depp also claimed the subtext to any question he fields from the press has the subtext, “God, I hate you”.
Not long after this press conference, Depp began production on Modì, Three Days on the Wing of Madness, a film he was writing and directing based on the life of Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani. Once again, the’ production was financed and filmed far away from a Hollywood studio, although Depp did manage to rope a couple of well-known names into working with him: Al Pacino and Stephen Graham.
Ironically, if Depp had continued making films like Jeanne du Barry and Modi in foreign locales, then his self-imposed American exile could have at least been respected. He didn’t feel welcome in Hollywood anymore, so he travelled the world to find willing financiers in other nations to make passion projects he cared about. You mightn’t like the guy, but there’s a certain amount of artistic purity in that.
Naturally, all this went out the window when it was announced on October 28th, 2024, that Depp had signed up to star in Marc Webb’s Day Drinker for Lionsgate. The action thriller will reunite Depp with Penelope Cruz, with whom he has shared the screen on three previous occasions. It’s written by Zach Dean, who penned Fast X and The Tomorrow War. This literally couldn’t be more Hollywood if it tried.
So, what happened in the 18 months between Cannes and this announcement? Why has Depp decided to return to a place he didn’t feel welcome and claimed to not need in his life anymore? Why would an action movie tempt him back if he felt so persecuted in Hollywood and had such a great time making arthouse fare in Italy and France?
Ultimately, despite his pretensions to artistic integrity and his feelings of betrayal at the hands of the Hollywood system that made him, Depp must have longed to be welcomed back this whole time. Feeling like a pariah, whether that’s entirely accurate or not, can’t be fun, so he’s jumped at the first chance to try and re-establish himself as a mainstream star again. He surely doesn’t need the money, so it must be about regaining his place as a part of the Hollywood furniture.
Is that hypocritical? Yes, probably. Is it surprising? No, not really. It always sounded like Depp did not protest too much, anyway.
However, here’s the real question: will Hollywood’s executives, colleagues, and audiences accept him back into the fold after his reputation took such a startling nosedive? That very much remains to be seen.
