Hollywood Vampires: Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, and the Celebrity Exploitation Machine

Filmmakers Loudenberg and Wholey debut with a thorough if salacious account of the marriage between actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard and the vitriolic online response and lawsuits that followed their divorce. Depp and Heard met in 2008 during casting for the Depp-produced film The Rum Diary. Soon he was buying her lavish gifts, including a replica of the film’s beach bar. The couple married in 2015, and their relationship was filled with substance use, verbal abuse, and physical altercations that resulted in Heard filing for divorce and a restraining order. Though their divorce was settled quickly in 2016, two subsequent trials brought notoriety: a 2018 libel suit in England after The Sun published an article calling Depp a “wife beater,” and an American jury trial, televised live in 2022, in which both parties sued each other for defamation. Loudenberg and Wholey incorporate rigorous research, but their analysis of the wider societal implications can get overwhelmed by tawdry details, which undermines their stated objective to “complicate simplistic narratives and convenient assumptions that have come to surround” the case. Readers may well wind up feeling complicit in the “celebrity industrial complex” the book is meant to impugn. (June)