Johnny Depp on for Hollywood comeback with first major casting post-trial

Johnny Depp is set to make his Hollywood comeback, landing his first major casting since his legal battles with former wife Amber Heard.

The actor was involved in a high-profile trial against Heard, ultimately winning a defamation case against her in 2022. The jury also found that Depp had defamed Heard through his attorney. In addition, he lost a libel case against The Sun in the UK in 2020.

In the period since the court cases, Depp has appeared in the independent French period drama Jeanne Du Barry, and has directed the biopic Modi: Three Days On The Wing Of Madness, about the life of Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani.

And now, The Hollywood Reporter report that Depp is being lined up for his first major Hollywood production in several years, in the thriller Day Drinker. The film will see him star as a mysterious day drinker that meets Penélope Cruz’s cruise ship bartender, only for the two to find themselves embroiled in a criminal underworld.

The film will be directed by Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider-Man, (500) Days Of Summer), and will see Depp and Cruz reunited, after previously starring in Blow, Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Murder On The Orient Express together.

Lionsgate Motion Picture Group chair Adam Fogelson has said: “Day Drinker combines a highly commercial concept with wildly outrageous twists and turns all set in an incredible world, and there is no better filmmaker than Marc or two more perfectly cast actors than Johnny and Penélope to bring that world to life.”

Depp recently declared that he does not have “any ill feelings toward” Hollywood after his recent troubles, and has reflected that his life was turned “into a soap opera” in the past few years.

“Honestly, I can sit here this very second and think about all the hit pieces, and how everybody was against me, and yeah yeah yeah he is off the map … endless stuff,” he said.

“I can remember it all. Went through it all. Some of it was not the most beautiful time, some of it was hilarious. Some of it was mad. The thing is, it simply just was, and it simply just is. So, for me, it happened. I learned, man.

“Everything that we experience, whether you’re given a snow cone or walking your dog, you learn something somewhere along the way,” Depp continued.

“So I don’t have any ill feelings toward anyone. I don’t have this great reserve of hatred, because hatred requires caring. Why carry that baggage?”

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