Johnny Depp Says He Doesn’t Feel Boycotted By Hollywood
A humbled and defensive Johnny Depp spoke up at the Cannes press conference this AM for the fest’s opening night film Jeanne du Barry. Not only was he moved by the standing ovation in the Grand Theatre Lumière, but he also referred to the wake of the Amber Heard trial headlines (without pointing to it), exclaiming, “In regards to me and my life, the majority of what you’ve read is fantastically horrifically written fiction.”
Asked by Deadline whether he still felt boycotted by Hollywood, feelings he expressed back in an August 2021 Sunday Times interview, the 3x Oscar nominee 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,” he said.
“Do I feel a boycott now? No, not at all. I don’t feel boycotted by Hollywood because I don’t think about Hollywood. I don’t have much further need for Hollywood myself,” he added. “I think it’s a very strange, funny time where everybody wants to be themselves, but they can’t, they must fall in line, conform and if you want to lead this life, I’ll be on the other side.”
Jeanne du Barry has been billed as the actor’s big-screen comeback movie after a three-year hiatus, while he battled his ex-wife Amber Heard in the courts, winning a defamation trial against her last summer.
But Depp challenged the “comeback” line.
“They’re using it as a kind of catchphrase. ‘The guy’s making a comeback’. I’ve had about 17 comebacks by the way, apparently,” he said.
“I keep wondering about the word ‘comeback’ because I didn’t go anywhere, he continued. “As a matter of fact, I live about 45 minutes away so, yeah. Maybe, maybe people stopped calling. I don’t know what their fear was at the time. I didn’t go nowhere. I’ve been sitting around. So ‘comeback’ is almost like I’m going to come out and do a tap dance or something like that.”
Asked by a reporter how he felt about the controversy surrounding his presence at Cannes, specifically those who didn’t want him here at the 76th edition, Depp answered, “What if they said to me, I cannot go to McDonald’s for life because somewhere if you got them all in one room, 39 people saw me watching me eat a Big Mac on a loop. Who are they? Why do they care? Some species or tower of mashed potatoes covered in light from a computer screen? Anonymous.”
In Jeanne du Barry, Depp plays Louis XV while filmmaker Maiwenn stars as his newly recruited mistress, Countess Jeanne du Barry.
The actor discussed Maïwenn’s bravado in selecting a non-French actor to play King Louis. The director mentioned that she had already gone out to some French actors who passed, but found Depp an anomaly, not for how long he has lived in France, but also for his deep knowledge of the country’s politics, art, and cinema. “He knew more about Louis VX than I did,” the filmmaker admitted.
“I was surprised to be chosen for this role,” said Depp, “Yeah, I thought someone had made a terrible mistake.”
“Maybe you want to try a French guy as King Louis,” said the actor, “She thought about it for a second. I thought about it for a second. It was brave of her to choose some hillbilly from Kentucky…”
Depp later said that one of his biggest aims for the role to take on the mantel of Louis XV in such a way that the audience would forget it was him on the big screen.
“You need to figure out a way that the viewer can forget who you are, all the baggage you carry… that was my biggest hope that the viewer would forget who had in front of him,” said the actor.
Off-screen from playing her rebellious title character, Maïwenn, admitted in a recent TV interview to assaulting Mediapart editor-in-chief Edwy Plenel which entailed pulling back his hair and spitting on him in a Parisian restaurant.
“She’s outspokenly anti-#MeToo and she made a gesture to please her world, and that’s why she bragged about it on TV. We could see a sort of pride that echoed that world,” Plenel blasted about Maïwenn in a recent Variety interview about the altercation.
Source: Deadline
