Warner Bros. fired Johnny Depp from the Fantastic Beasts series when he lost a libel case involving his relationship with ex-wife Amber Heard. Now, many fans want WB to fire her.
Last month, Warner Bros. officially asked Johnny Depp to resign from his role as dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald in the Harry Potter spinoff series Fantastic Beasts, and he did (Mads Mikkelsen is replacing him). This came right after he lost a libel suit against newspaper The Sun, which had described him in print as a “wife-beater.” The judge, accepting the testimony of Depp’s ex-wife Amber Heard as “substantially true,” ruled that the descriptor was appropriate.
Not long after that, a petition appeared on Change.org urging Warner Bros. to “Remove Amber Heard from Aquaman 2,” which is currently penciled in for a release date of December 16, 2022. In the first movie, Heard played Mera, an Atlantean warrior and love interest for Aquaman. But will it stay that way?
The saga of Heard and Depp’s divorce is a long one. Heard first filed for divorce in 2016, alleging that Depp had physically abused her. The divorce was finalized in 2017. In 2018, Heard wrote an op-ed about her experience, and although she didn’t refer to Depp by name, it wasn’t hard to guess who she was talking about. In response, Depp sued Heard for defamation to the tune of $50 million, alleging that she was “a perpetrator” of physical abuse on him. Earlier this year, he introduced phone recordings into evidence where Heard admits to “hitting” him. Heard put forward her own evidence, detailing multiple instances of abuse and references the scars she still had as a result.
It’s a very ugly back-and-forth these two are having, and because they’re famous, the internet is in on it too. While public opinion was on Heard’s side in the early going, Depp has plenty of supporters too (or at the least, plenty of people are against Heard). As of this writing, that Change.org petition has over 1.6 million signatures and counting.
That actually wasn’t the first petition to remove Amber Heard from Aquaman 2, but it easily has the most signatures. Jeanne Larson created it very shortly after Heard said she was “so excited to film” the movie and blamed calls for her ouster on “paid rumors and paid campaigns on social media” that “have no basis in reality.”
I don’t think people need to be paid to call for Heard to be fired, although I do wonder if Warner Bros. will actually fire her if bad social media buzz is all there is. Depp had plenty of bad buzz about playing Grindelwald, but Warner Bros. only canned him after he lost his libel case against The Sun. If Heard loses the defamation case Depp has filed against her, it may push Warner Bros. to act, assuming things like the petition don’t do it first.
Also, FYI: the Amber Heard petition still doesn’t have as many signatures as the infamous petition to remake the final season of Game of Thrones with “competent writers,” but it’s gaining.
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