Amber Heard says Johnny Depp’s hatred for James Franco led to fights between them when she worked with Franco during their relationship.
Heard, 36, first acted alongside Franco in the 2008 comedy Pineapple Express. Then, while engaged to Depp, 58, Heard reunited with Franco to star in the 2015 crime drama The Adderall Diaries. She filmed the latter movie in New York back in May 2014 while Depp made Black Mass in Boston. During her second day of testimony, Heard recalled the “nightmare” of arguments she and Depp got in over her famous costar.
She said Depp “was mad at me for taking the job with James Franco. He hated, hated James Franco and was already accusing me of kind of secretly having a thing with him in my past, since we had done Pineapple Express together.”
“He had already been upset with me and accused me in many arguments about not telling him about scenes that I had, if I had a kissing scene,” Heard said. “Any sort of romantic scene, and I wasn’t explicit about what I was going to do, then I was accused of having withheld information and hiding it from him. So I didn’t want the fight, of course, I didn’t want the argument, but I had to kind of egg-shell tip-toe around how to tell him when I had any sort of scene like that.”
Heard said that when described her scenes with Franco to Depp over the phone, he became upset and “screamed” at her, she said, almost as if “I had told him I had had an affair; he was that angry at me.” Heard recalled being “nervous” to see Depp next, as she planned to fly to Boston to go with him to Los Angeles for his daughter Lily-Rose’s birthday. When Depp got on the private plane, “I just knew in every cell of my body something was wrong.”
“I could anticipate that there was a no-win situation here,” she said.
Heard said she tried not to “engage” as he asked her questions about doing a romantic scene with Franco, asking whether he “slipped a tongue” during the kissing. Depp was “saying really disgusting things about my body,” she added, “about how I liked it, how I responded. Then he started straight up taunting me. ‘I know you liked it.’ He called me a ‘go-getter.’ ”
She said he called her a “slut” and other names in front of the security and assistants on the plane, which “embarrassed” her. Heard got up “so slowly” to remove herself from the conversation and not “aggravate” him further, she testified, and he began throwing objects at her, like ice cubes and utensils.
Heard said Depp slapped her on the face when she stopped replying to him. “It was the first time anything like that had happened in front of somebody,” she said. When she tried to walk away and change seats again, she testified that she felt his boot on her back as he kicked her, causing her to fall to the floor.
“No one said anything. No one did anything,” she said through tears. “You could hear a pin drop on that plane. You could feel the tension. But nobody did anything. … I felt so embarrassed that he could kick me to the ground in front of people.”
Depp — who has said multiple times under oath that he has never struck Heard or any woman — addressed the alleged 2014 Boston-to-L.A. flight incident during his testimony earlier in the trial. He confirmed that they had “argued the night before,” saying Heard was “actively searching” for a fight to instigate with him.
He testified that when he got on the plane he was “not feeling any pain” while taking opiates at the time, denying that he was drunk. “I knew that she was ready for some kind of brawl, and I sat on the plane drawing in my notebook. She would verbally heckle, hassle, accuse, poke, prod physically, psychologically and emotionally,” he said, until he went to “hide” in the plane bathroom where he locked himself inside and fell asleep.
During cross-examination, Depp confirmed that they had argued about Franco and that he suspected Heard was having an affair with the actor.
Heard and Depp met while making the 2011 film The Rum Diary, and later wed in 2015. They broke up in May 2016, when Heard sought a domestic violence restraining order against him, accusing him of abusing her. Depp denied the claims, and the former couple settled their divorce out of court in August 2016.
Depp is suing Heard for defamation over a 2018 op-ed she wrote for The Washington Post about surviving domestic violence, though she never mentioned Depp by name in the article. The Pirates of the Caribbean actor originally filed the $50 million lawsuit in March 2019.
Back in November 2020, Depp lost his highly publicized U.K. libel lawsuit case against British tabloid The Sun for calling him a “wife-beater.” The court upheld the outlet’s claims as being “substantially true” and Heard testified to back up the claims. In March 2021, his attempt to overturn the decision was overruled.
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