A raven swoops over snowy London. A baby in a bonnet starts to cry. “The master of misfits returns,” spiky red letters proclaim. Johnny Depp is back. Ebenezer is Paramount’s new film, out in November, a dark retelling of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, made by Ti West, director of campy horrors like MaXXXine (2024). In the recently released trailer, Depp winks, leers, cackles and makes fart noises. “It’s good to be back,” he growls.
Depp hasn’t been gone very long. He was dropped from the Fantastic Beasts Harry Potter spin-off series in 2020 after he lost a UK libel trial he had brought against the Sun, which had called him a “wife-beater”. The UK High Court found that he had physically abused his ex-wife Amber Heard on at least 12 occasions, including slapping her, pulling her hair and knocking her to the floor. A few years later, he successfully sued Heard in the US for a 2018 article she had written in the Washington Post, in a televised jury trial.
Heard has rarely been seen since the US trial. Meanwhile, Depp’s “comeback” began in 2023, when he starred in a French film, Jeanne du Barry (feminists campaigned against its Cannes premiere). He performed self-pitying songs on tour with Jeff Beck. He never lost his Dior “Sauvage” fragrance contract – an apt label for a man who, it was revealed in court, had written text messages to friends that said: “I’m a fucking savage.”
And now we have collectively decided he can return to the mainstream. In late July, Depp appeared in character as Scrooge at the San Diego Comic-Con, mock-insulting and throwing sweets at delighted fans. If Me Too was ever powerful enough to destroy a man’s career, that moment has passed.
Ebenezer was filmed mostly in Ireland and England, and stars a host of British celebrities, many of whom are courageous and outspoken on matters of justice. Ian McKellan, long-time advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, plays the Ghost of Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s dead business partner. Younger actors from big teen franchises whose stars have waned somewhat – Star Wars’s Daisy Ridley, The Hunger Games’s Sam Claflin – have taken minor roles. Rupert Grint, the Harry Potter franchise’s Ron Weasley, is Bob Cratchit, Scrooge’s underpaid clerk.
Grint has not been afraid to take a political stance before. He publicly distanced himself from JK Rowling over her stance on trans rights. Later he likened her to an “auntie” he sometimes clashes with. “I don’t necessarily agree with everything my auntie says, but she’s still my auntie,” he said. If he finds Auntie Jo’s language offensive, he may have some greater issues with Uncle Johnny. Perhaps over the time Depp texted his talent agent in 2016, saying that Heard was a “gold digging, low level, dime a dozen, mushy, pointless dangling overused flappy fish market”. Or when he wrote in 2013 to the actor Paul Bettany: “Let’s drown her before we burn her!!!… I will fuck her burnt corpse afterwards to make sure she’s dead.”
During the US trial, Heard said she received hundreds of death threats a day. Many protesters – mostly women – carried “Justice for Johnny” signs; in the UK, Fathers for Justice launched a “Ditch the Witch” campaign. Videos mocking Heard crying became a popular TikTok trend. The hashtag “JusticeforJohnnyDepp” got 20.4 billion views. Brands joined in on the joke. It was, as Moira Donegan wrote in the Guardian at the time, a “public orgy of misogyny”. “She is begging for global humiliation,” Depp had texted his agent before the trial. “And she’s going to get it.”
It was infuriating, and painful, to see how easily people could conclude Heard was making the whole thing up because they liked the drunk pirate Depp played 20 years ago. Young people backed Depp the most. According to a poll conducted in the US, while his approval rating among baby boomers dropped more than 20 points during the second trial, for Gen Z it declined by only 2 per cent.
Supporting Depp became a weird point of self-righteous pride. When I brought up the trial, my female friends would look serious and say pointedly, “You know it’s important to believe male victims, too,” referring to Depp’s own allegations about Heard’s domestic violence towards him. Never mind that Depp had been previously accused of assaulting men. Never mind the High Court’s ruling that Heard had been the victim of “sustained and multiple assaults”. It seemed that for Gen Z, condemning violence against women had become a bit passé. The generation that reached its maturity during the Harvey Weinstein scandal and 2017 Women’s March against Donald Trump had decided the war on misogyny had somehow been won. We needed to find a more interesting angle. Everyone involved in the case was white and rich, so how about a really novel idea: what if the female accuser is actually a lying bitch? Or, in Depp’s words, a “worthless hooker” and a “filthy whore”?
There are, of course, greater tragedies than a horrible celebrity divorce, and Depp has gone on record to say he is “ashamed” of the texts, which he characterised as “dark humour”. But it’s profoundly depressing to watch another outpouring of adoration towards a man who once said he hoped his ex-wife’s “rotting corpse is decomposing in the fucking trunk of a Honda Civic”. Paramount’s calculation seems correct, judging by the YouTube comments under the trailer. “Yes!! Johnny Depp is back, baby!” one person wrote. Me Too was a ripple in the wind.
[Further reading: The new nuclear terror]
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This article appears in the 29 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The new terror
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentIt’s so sad how many people are willing to overlook it all
As someone who only knew of Depp as an actor and had seen him in one movie (PotC ) and never heard of AH I really had no opinion before watching the US trial.
As I’m retired I watched the entire thing and find it hard to understand how your comment writer can justify that opinion. Later I learned of the UK one where evidence was presented without oversight and proper examination, the facts of that are readily available.
Watching AH being caught blatantly lying on the stand and her so called proofs being demolished live on camera surely any open minded person couldn’t fail to reach the same verdict as that jury. I would point out it was a jury not a single judge as on the UK whose impartiality could be called into question.
Yes I think it did damage to the me too movement but I don’t believe it was the Depp side who caused that.
Do I think he’s blameless, no but she came across as self serving.
I’d like to see more people reflecting that reality and call out any side who uses false accusations to further their own agenda.
Sad that nowadays truth seems to take a back seat.
If you try to destroy men you dislike, you may get destroyed.
Or, more probably, ignored.
And rightly so.
Stop expecting society to dance to your tune.
This article is completely ignoring the multiple eyewitnesses that saw Heard throw things at Depp, the recordings in which she said “I f***ing was hitting you”, the hand surgeon who said Depp’s severer finger was from a velocity injury (i.e. consistent with Depp’s story about having a vodka bottle thrown at him not Herd’s story about him cutting it off himself), the multiple people who saw Heard without injuries when she claimed to have a broken nose, the evidence of Heard editing and staging photos, the testimony form psychologists that she was violent, her previous arrest for domestic violence, or the fact that she was convicted of liable and the judge and jury believed she was abusive.
She was an abuser, and when her victim left, she switched tactics to slander – and those tactics worked.
The fact that he was a millionaire and so was rich enough to fight back and survive circumstances that might have (and have) killed men with less capital and support doesn’t change that. It is true that a lot of the Heard hate got out of hand – but so did a lot of the James Charles hate; it doesn’t mean he wasn’t guilty. It is also true that the High Court trial found the Sun innocent of libel – that only shows that they didn’t technically fail in their due diligence as a newspaper. Are we really in the business of defending Rupert Murdoch’s right to talk sh*t about people with impunity?
This article using an abuse victim’s worst moments against him and implying that his supporters are just stupid fan girls who didn’t watch the trial, is exactly the wrong way to build a credible anti-abuse movement. The lesson here is that if you want to have a successful anti-abuse movement, you need to include male victims from the start and commit to investigating and weeding out false accusations.
If MeToo failed due to the Heard/ Depp affair, it’s because it directly facilitated an abusive woman’s attempt to continue to abuse her victim by slandering him as an abuser. Which means it deserved to fail.
Some men knw what some women really want…..
Like leftists, feminists are bad people demanding that the world should become a better place.
And often campaigning towards that end.
To no avail. Amazingly enough.