Waves lapped gently on the white sandy beach of Johnny Depp’s private Bahamian island as he waited – in a natty white jacket, black waistcoat and pocket chain under an arbour draped in gauzy white fabric and festooned with greenery and roses – for his bride Amber Heard.
The 28-year-old actress looked stunning in a white patterned lace gown and a sheer veil, clutching a bouquet of roses and eucalyptus, as she arrived on the arm of her father David to meet her 51-year-old groom.
As scene settings go, it could hardly have been more romantic.
The truth, as the world subsequently learned – thanks to two bruising court cases in which both parties sued for defamation and accused each other of domestic abuse – is that the A-List union between the Pirates of the Caribbean star and his young bride was arguably the most toxic Hollywood has ever seen.
And now, a decade on from that bizarre wedding day, a new book written by two documentary makers who had unprecedented access to almost 100 employees, friends and witnesses, has taken the drama to a whole new level.
Hollywood Vampires: Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, and the Celebrity Exploitation Machine by Kelly Loudenberg and Makiko Wholey is nothing short of astonishing in its detail.
The A-List union between Depp and his young bride was arguably the most toxic Hollywood has ever seen, writes Mcmahon
‘They looked like f****** zombies,’ Depp’s childhood friend Bruce Witkin, one of the 30 guests present at the drug-fuelled ceremony in 2015 recalled to the authors. ‘Johnny looked sedated, Amber too. If you need that much medication to get along with the person you love, there’s something f****** wrong.’
Indeed there was and 15 months later the union imploded.
Neither party emerged well from the tumultuous legal battles that followed on both sides of the Atlantic – during which lurid details of their jealousy, drug and alcohol consumption were publicly aired – and both have tried to move on.
Depp was widely regarded to have emerged the ‘victor’ if such a term is appropriate in a battle so mutually damaging.
Having lost the first libel case in London against the Sun newspaper for calling him a ‘wife beater’, he went on to win a subsequent televised libel trial in the US state of Virginia in which he was awarded more than $10million in damages (while Heard was also deemed to have been defamed by one of Depp’s lawyers and awarded $2million.)
Today the star continues to try to repair his public image having signed a three-year $20million contract to be the face of Dior Sauvage men’s fragrance, and is currently filming his new project Day Drinker with the actress Penelope Cruz in Madrid.
The Spanish capital, coincidentally, is where his ex-wife lives quietly as a single mother with four-year-old daughter Oonagh and recently arrived twins Agnes and son Ocean. All are believed to have been born via surrogacy.
Doubtless she will have noticed his latest reputation-enhancing visit this week to a local children’s hospital where he was photographed dressed as his Pirates of the Caribbean alter-ego Jack Sparrow as he entertained youngsters in their beds.
And to rub further salt in the wound, Depp is being viewed in some circles as having come across as the more sympathetic party in Hollywood Vampires, partly perhaps as he has co-operated fully with the authors, while Heard pulled out of the project after the UK libel trial ended and the authors expanded their original remit from a documentary to a book.
One thing all can surely agree on is that the pairing was doomed from the start. Just how catastrophically doomed, is now fully laid bare by Vampire’s authors and their extraordinary access.
Amber Heard testifies during the Depp vs Heard defamation trial in May 2022. Heard is unable to pay her ex-husband Johnny Depp more than $10million in damages after the jury took the side of the Pirates of the Caribbean star
During the trial, Depp said Heard had slapped him with a vodka bottle and cut his finger clean off. Heard said she had taken a sedative and wasn’t awake when the incident happened
For those who thought they were already well versed in every sordid twist and turn of this Hollywood horror show, the new detail is gripping.
The mismatched couple first met in 2009 when Heard was being considered as the love interest in The Rum Diary, based on the novel by Depp’s renegade journalist friend Hunter S Thompson.
At the time, Depp was one of the hottest stars in the world. His films had earned more than $3 billion collectively, he had been nominated for three Academy Awards and named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive for the second time.
The grungy, tattooed actor would go on to be paid a reported $265million by Disney for five Pirates of the Caribbean films.
Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson were both initially considered for the part but when Depp met Heard, according to the book, he took one look at her and said, ‘Yep, that’s the one. She could definitely kill me. That’s what Hunter wants.’
Heard was in a relationship with a woman at the time and the director of the film was anxious about their on-screen chemistry.
‘Don’t worry, no leading lady of mine stays gay for very long,’ Depp told him.
Indeed, a shower scene in the film in which the two characters kissed ‘didn’t feel like a normal scene. It felt real,’ Heard would later say.
However it wasn’t until 2012 when Depp and his long-term partner Vanessa Paradis – with whom he shared two children – announced their separation, that Depp began to pursue Heard romantically, against the advice of friends and family.
Childhood chum Bruce Witkin from Kentucky feared Heard represented an ‘aspiring, ambitious side of Hollywood,’ and wanted his friend to enjoy bachelor life for a while suggesting he ‘Go Clooney it up.’
The actor wouldn’t hear of it. He wooed Heard with poems and flowers and so began a relationship described by both of their inner circles as a ‘match made in hell’, and which the Vampire authors have dubbed ‘a toxic roundabout of fighting and making up.’
So heated were the couple’s rows that early in the relationship the actor told Stephen Deuters, head of Depp’s European production company, he was worried he might wake up in the middle of the night to find Heard straddling him with a knife.
Undeterred, Depp duly proposed to Heard in 2014 in their suite at the Corinthia Hotel in London, asking her to ‘be his girl,’ and she accepted.
From the outset Depp’s staff were on high alert and when the couple travelled together they would book an extra hotel room so if or when a row broke out the couple could be separated.
His assistant Nathan Holmes described the pair as being like two magnets that can’t be pulled all the way together and was dismayed by the proposal. ‘I thought: Why have you done that?’ he says in the book.
At their engagement party a few weeks later in Los Angeles, Depp holed up in a room where he took drugs while the guests – almost exclusively Heard’s friends – partied and hardly saw him.
The fighting and arguments continued, as did Depp’s heavy drinking.
In May 2014, when the couple flew by private plane from Los Angeles to Boston, Depp got so drunk he passed out in the bathroom. According to Heard, he thought she was having an affair with her co-star James Franco on The Adderall Diaries and kicked her in the back and she fell over. Depp claimed he had only given her playful tap on the bottom and that he had locked himself in the bathroom to get away from his fiancée.
In January 2015, there was another chaotic journey on a flight to Japan when the couple fought bitterly after Depp asked Heard to sign a prenup.
Dr David Kipper, Depp’s so-called ‘concierge doctor’ and addiction specialist, describes ‘thrown coffee, attempts by him to storm the cockpit, attempts by her to leave the plane’ while the aircraft was over the ocean.
When Heard pushed for the wedding to happen quickly, saying she was seeking stability by formalizing their union and wanted to be married before Depp went to Australia for six months of filming the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean, Depp’s protective inner circle saw it differently.
‘When they were married, Amber would get half of all he’d make on his films,’ Depp’s assistant Nathan Holmes told the authors. ‘So, she wanted to be married before the next Pirates film.’
In the end, no prenup was signed and there was a small civil ceremony in LA in February 2015. Depp’s devoted Glaswegian bodyguard Malcolm Connolly asked him if he really wanted to go ahead and suggested he and Depp make a bolt for Las Vegas and deal with the consequences later.
‘No, No. I can’t. I wouldn’t do that,’ Depp said.
During the ceremony, Depp’s mother Betty Sue said loudly enough for the bride to hear: ‘She don’t love him.’
Shortly afterwards, a lavish second wedding was held on Depp’s 45-acre private island, with Heard’s friends partying hard in the run-up to the big day.
Depp’s personal chef Russell Borrill said: ‘People were hungover, doing drugs. Some meals were a waste because nobody would turn up.’
After the ceremony, the couple took to the dancefloor as man and wife. When the music stopped, Heard held her fist up to Depp’s face and pretended to punch him, smiling.
Shortly after the wedding Depp flew to Australia to film the next Pirates movie Dead Men Tell No Tales in March 2015, and when Amber arrived a row over drugs and a prenup soon deteriorated into what has become known as the ‘severed finger incident’.
Two days after Heard had arrived a the luxurious rented apartment she was to share with Depp, the star’s bodyguard Malcolm Connolly got a call from the actor’s head of security. ‘Something’s happened with the boss, man,’ he said. ‘You need to extract him…take him out of there.’
In later court hearings, husband and wife shared different accounts of what happened.
Depp said the actress had slapped him with a vodka bottle and cut his finger clean off. Heard said she had taken a sedative and wasn’t awake when the incident happened. She further claimed in court that her former husband had sexually assaulted her with a vodka bottle during an alcohol-fuelled rage.
Both claimed to have been hiding from each other in the house and Heard would later assert that she had been trapped in a ‘three-day hostage situation.’
Depp had used his severed finger to scrawl messages in blood and paint on the walls of the house and on furniture.
In Hollywood Vampires, Depp’s butler Ben King, whose career began at the age of 20 when he served the Queen in Buckingham Palace, found the actor’s severed fingertip but it was too late to reattach it.
‘I think it’s safe to say we lost our deposit,’ the former royal staffer told the authors with masterful understatement about the damage to the property.
The couple reconciled for the remainder of the Australian shoot but by April 2016 the final unravelling was underway.
On April 21st Heard held a party for her 30th birthday consisting almost entirely of her friends in the couple’s luxury LA penthouse in which she and Depp were both high on drugs and hostile to each other.
The following morning a housekeeper found faeces in the marital bed which Heard blamed on one of their tiny Yorkie dogs. For Depp, who disputed Heard’s version of events, it was the final straw and a month later he filed for divorce.
While Depp’s inner circle has the bigger say in the book because Heard pulled out of the arrangement with the authors, one of Heard’s biggest supporters is her ex-girlfriend Bianca Butti.
She provided never-before-seen footage for the initial documentary project and said she believed Heard as she saw her testify in court.
‘It almost sounded like someone else was talking,’ Butti recalled. ‘By the time you tell it a million times you remove yourself from emotional content. She was completely detached… shut down.
‘I believe all of it, especially as someone who was her intimate partner. If I made a sudden movement during an argument, she would recoil. It was clear to me she was in a very violent relationship.’
The couple had a peculiar dynamic that prevented them from expressing themselves in a measured way, she told the authors. ‘She was trying to stand her own ground, and he just wasn’t having it. He was blacked out and drinking, a lot of drug-doing and alcohol, and that is always a recipe for disaster.’
The couple reached a $7million settlement in their divorce which was finalised in 2017.
Despite everything they learned, the American authors recently told Fox News they believed there was genuine love between Depp and Heard.
One can only hope for both their sakes, this is indeed the final chapter in Hollywood’s most hellish union.
