how the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard saga began
The tradition of actors falling in love while appearing on set opposite each other is a long and (occasionally) noble one. From Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor embarking on a torrid affair while enacting the no less passionate romance of Mark Anthony and Cleopatra to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie striking sparks in Mr and Mrs Smith, many of the world’s most famous couples have met while performing love scenes on screen.
In many cases, however, the artistic results are nonetheless dismal. Look at Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck in the notorious flop Gigli; likewise, the bizarre supernatural debacle The Dream House will only be remembered for introducing Daniel Craig to Rachel Weisz. But little has come close to Bruce Robinson’s The Rum Diary for the notoriety of the pairing that ensued, or its calamitous results, which are playing out publicly in the most tawdry and embarrassing of ways for Johnny Depp and Amber Heard: the very definition of a star couple whose love affair not only overshadowed the film that they met on at the time, but has continued to do so ever since.
Before he became synonymous with domestic abuse and public disgrace, Depp was probably the coolest actor in the world. He had carefully – some might say accidentally – combined impeccable indie credentials with the blockbuster series of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which had given him the rare ability to have personal projects greenlit without any particular expectation that they would make money. Few others could have had The Libertine made, a biopic of the notorious rake-poet John Wilmot, or ensured that a dark, violent adaptation of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd would be a box-office success, despite being almost wholly sung.
But Depp’s commercial cachet was used to further two particular obsessions that had hung over his career since it began: Hunter S Thompson, and Withnail and I. In the case of the former, Depp had been able to parlay both his friendships with Thompson and the director Terry Gilliam into seeing the seemingly unadaptable Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas turned into a film in 1998. Depp played the Thompson alter ego Raoul Duke, and the picture co-starred Benicio del Toro as Dr Gonzo, a thinly disguised portrayal of the attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta.
Fear and Loathing… was neither commercially or critically successful, but Depp wished to continue his association with Thompson, which he continued up until the writer’s death by suicide in 2005. After he died, the actor decided that the best way to commemorate his friend was to ensure that his 1998 novel The Rum Diary was to be adapted for film.
The only person whom he wanted to direct it was Bruce Robinson, the writer and director of Withnail. Depp said of the film: “If there’s any cinema that can be deemed as perfect, Withnail & I is there. It’s poetic with incredible gravity, huge humour, absurdity, irreverence, and all of the elements and ingredients that I find fascinating, not only in cinema, but life.” It was unsurprising that, speaking after The Rum Diary’s release at the Oxford Union, Depp described Robinson as “the dream director for both Hunter and myself”.
There had been an attempt to recruit Robinson to write and direct Fear and Loathing – after all, the obvious similarities between Thompson’s novel and Withnail would suggest that Robinson would have done a fine job, and probably a better one than Gilliam eventually managed – but Robinson, who had not directed a film since the studio-botched 1992 serial-killer film Jennifer 8, was, in Depp’s arch description, “unavailable by choice”. Yet Thompson remained keen that Robinson should direct an adaptation of one of his books, even as Depp reminded him that “[Robinson] was stuck somewhere in the country, out in [the] south of England, and not remotely interested in anything that pertains to Hollywood.”
After Thompson’s death, Depp redoubled his attempts to seduce the filmmaker. Robinson, who had been depressed by what he saw as ham-fisted adaptations of his screenplays by other directors, wished to abandon the film industry altogether, but Depp continued to pay court – or lay siege – to him for several years, saying: “I persisted like some awful animal.” In remarks that have uncomfortable resonance given the allegations of Depp’s behaviour that have emerged in court, Robinson eventually gave in, saying, “He hooked me. He got me with wine, by the way. He plied me with wine and had his way with me”, as the actor agreed, “Yeah, I got him drunk and took advantage.”
Depp was cast in the lead role of Paul Kemp, a once-idealistic but now dipsomaniac writer abroad who takes a job on a local newspaper in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Although the autobiographical character, as conceived by Thompson, was supposed to be in his early 20s, the then-38 year old Depp was a fait accompli for the part. As Robinson remarked: “It was perfectly clear that the reason that Johnny’s Kemp was older than the character in the book was because he’d been drinking his life away. We start the film with him looking for vodka.” Just like Richard E Grant’s Withnail is in his 20s but could pass for a decade older, so Depp’s Kemp was the latest in Robinson’s portraits of stylishly dissolute and self-destructive types, railing against the dying of the light.
The rest of the cast came together easily, keen to work with Robinson and Depp and impressed by Thompson’s legacy. They included Aaron Eckhart as the antagonist Hal Sanderson, a crooked property developer, the great Richard Jenkins as Kemp’s long-suffering editor, and Giovanni Ribisi as the failed journalist Moburg, with whom Kemp strikes up a distinctly Withnail and Marwood-esque relationship.
The hardest part to cast was that of Chenault, Sanderson’s fiancée. Such bankable names as Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley were suggested, but Depp’s choice proved to be the then-little known actress Amber Heard, best known for small appearances in Zombieland and Pineapple Express. When asked why she had been cast, Depp gushingly replied: “Bruce had met with her, and when I saw Amber, I thought, ‘She’s everything that Hunter would adore, in terms of the character.’ I also thought that she was absolutely just like seeing an old movie star. She’s like Lauren Bacall.” His professional infatuation would soon turn personal, and subsequently prove his undoing.
Filming The Rum Diary proved to be a difficult business, not least because Robinson, a noted bon viveur who had given up alcohol for six-and-a-half years, resumed drinking while he made the film. He described the amount of drink consumed on set as “savage”. But at least his relationship with Depp was a strong and close one. Just prior to production, the two had been on a bibulous location scouting trip to Puerto Rico, and then things went awry upon their return flight home.
As the director told The Independent in 2011:
“Everything on the plane switched off… we [were] losing altitude, over San Diego. Johnny and I are looking out of the window, in silence, at the horizon coming up to meet us. We are both thinking: this is it. We look at each other and – possibly because of the amount of Château Haut-Brion we’ve drunk – we just start laughing. Laughing to the point that we are out of our seats, with our knees on the floor… we really did think we were going to die, right there in that stinking Gulfstream off the West Coast. Then, after about two minutes, the engines started again. It really was a rite of passage.”
Not all was lost. Robinson concluded: “My main thought was: I really like this guy.”
Despite the near-death experiences and heavy drinking on set, production concluded smoothly enough, and the film was eventually released in October 2011, shortly after Depp’s fourth Pirates of the Caribbean picture. That film made over a billion dollars worldwide, but The Rum Diary lost money on even its relatively modest $45 million budget, barely grossing $30 million worldwide.
Nor was it well received critically. The general consensus was that, despite the good intentions behind it, the mixture of Withnail-esque humour and Depp’s admirable desire to commemorate his friend’s writing never entirely gelled, offering plenty of fleeting pleasures but never cohering into a satisfactory film.
A decade later, it is hard to disagree, even if some of the scabrous dialogue does rank with Robinson’s greatest work. “Your tongue is like an accusatory gimlet!” Kemp memorably declares at one point. The clear anti-authoritarian interests of its director, star and original author are there to see, with the script’s contempt for “the bastards”, but the Eckhart-led plot about local corruption is dull, Heard’s romantic lead is weak and there is little chemistry between the two stars. Judged artistically, it is an interesting but unsatisfactory coda to Robinson’s career – the director shows no signs of making another film – rather than anything more significant.
Its true legacy, however, lies elsewhere. As Depp said in court during his cross-examination, despite the 25-year age gap between the two (he called himself “the old, craggy fogey” and Heard “the beautiful creature”), what initially seemed like a great Hollywood romance evolved between the two during filming. The two called each other “Slim” and “Steve”, in conscious emulation of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall during To Have and Have Not – a rare example of a pair of high-profile actors having a successful and lasting relationship – and Depp gallantly intervened to prevent Heard from having to do a topless scene, insisting that she retain her bra.
He then realised while filming a love scene between the two that there was chemistry – as he said on the stand, “that moment… felt like something; it felt like something I should not be feeling… and even though it was a scene, she had her wife [the photographer Tasya van Ree] and I had Vanessa [Paradis] and kiddies.”
Although the two had a subsequent dalliance which involved listening to blues music and kissing, they did not consummate their relationship until they re-encountered one another in 2011, two years after filming finished. By this time, Depp’s relationship with Paradis had found itself in some of what he called “not so great situations” as she wished to return to France, while Heard had separated from her partner.
The couple officially began dating early the next year, married in February 2015 and separated 15 months later. The rest has passed into notoriety. It is impossible to know what the future holds for either Depp or Heard, as both of their careers have imploded thanks to the seemingly endless legal battles that they are fighting, which may or may not be resolved this year.
But perhaps the film’s star now looks back with infinite regret at the remark that he made when he first saw Heard: “That’s the Chenault that Hunter wants. Yep, she could definitely kill me.” What’s playing out in court in America is testament to the accuracy of that.
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