Supporters of American actor Johnny Depp have streamed his films for 24 hours in protest against his former wife Amber Heard’s new show, The Stand.
The Pirates of the Caribbean star, whose career has been in tatters following his unsuccessful libel court tussle with the publishers of The Sun tabloid, whom he sued over an article where he was labelled a “wife beater”, has a staunch army of fans who have rallied around the fallen celeb.
Currently, Amber Heard is playing a supporting role in CBS’ The Stand, based on the book by Stephen King. The fact that she is nabbing new roles while Johnny Depp has been dogged by headlines spawned by his disintegrated marriage after his former spouse’s claims he had repeatedly physically and verbally abused her has incensed fans.
The latter organised to go online to watch favourites like Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and Transcendence online, getting the hashtag #DeppMovieNight trending on Twitter.
Earlier, around 1.5 million fans signed a petition for Warner Bros. to have Amber Heard fired from Aquaman 2, and threatened to boycott Fantastic Beasts 3 after Mads Mikkelsen took over as the new Grindelwald in the Wizarding World prequel after the black-marked Depp was kicked out of the Fantastic Beasts 3 movie franchise.
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer was recently reported by movie industry insiders as trying to get Disney to agree to recruiting Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow for a cameo appearance in one of the upcoming Pirates movies after the media conglomerate dropped him from Pirates of the Caribbean over the stream of negative publicity.
Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard Legal Spat
The now estranged couple met on the set of "The Rum Diary" and started dating in 2012.
Johnny Depp divorced Vanessa Paradis, the mother of his two children, with whom he'd lived for 14 years. Just 15 months after Heard and Depp tied the knot in 2015, the actress filed for a divorce, alleging domestic abuse.
The actor has vehemently denied all accusations.
In 2018 Depp sued the publishers of The Sun newspaper after the tabloid printed an article spouting allegations that he had been violent towards his ex-wife Amber Heard.
However, Judge Nikol ruled that 12 of the 14 alleged incidents of domestic violence mentioned in the newspaper’s article had occurred, while also rejecting Depp’s claim that Heard was a "gold-digger" who feigned injuries. The actor recently applied to a court of appeals to overturn the verdict.
Tensions spiralled anew after Aquaman star Heard wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post in 2019, in which she spoke about being a victim of domestic abuse. Depp launched a separate $50 million defamation suit against Heard, with the case scheduled to be heard in the spring of 2021.