This week Johnny Depp has spoken of his time working on Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise during his $50 million defamation trial, in which he’s suing his ex-wife Amber Heard, who is counter-suing him. The actress’ attorney Ben Rottenborn asked the Hollywood star about Pirates of the Caribbean 6 and if he’d return as Jack Sparrow for a huge sum. However, the Jack Sparrow star was adamant he would not.
At Fairfax County Courthouse in Virginia, Rottenborn asked this week: “The fact is, Mr Depp, if Disney came to you with $300 million and a million alpacas, nothing on this earth would get you to go back and work with Disney on a Pirates of the Caribbean film? Correct?”
Depp simply replied: “That is true, Mr Rottenborn.”
The 58-year-old also admitted that he’s never seen Pirates of the Caribbean, saying: “I didn’t see it. But I believe that the film did pretty well, apparently.” The Curse of the Black Pearl made a whopping $654.3 million worldwide on a budget of $140 million. Two of the four sequels would go on to make over $1 billion each.
Being asked about potentially returning for Pirates of the Caribbean 6 came up when Depp was questioned about his career and how his life changed after the success of the first Jack Sparrow movie back in 2003.
The star said: “Cartoon characters can get away with things we can’t. Captain Jack Sparrow can do things that I could never do. He could say things that I could never say. So it was for me, a way to stretch the parameters of a character and take a risk in doing that. But if it panned out, and I felt I was on a pretty good mission, I thought that it might be a character who would be accepted by five-year-olds and 45-year-olds, 65-year-olds and 85-year-olds in the same way that Bugs Bunny is.”
Depp added: “They wanted to keep going [after the success of the first film], making more and I was fine to do that. It’s not like you become that person, but if you know that character to the degree that I did – because he was not what the writers wrote, so they really weren’t able to write for him… Once you know the character better than the writers, that’s when you have to be true to the character and add your words.”
The trial continues.
