Johnny Depp, at Cannes, was a spectacle of his own making

THE AGING PROCESS IS KIND TO NO ONE, AND THAT includes Johnny Depp..

- STEPHANIE ZACHAREK/CANNES, FRANCE

On May 16, Depp was in Cannes to walk the red carpet for the festival's opening-night film, Maïwenn's misunderstood-mistress extravaganza Jeanne du Barry, in which Depp plays King Louis XV, whose devotion to his favorite extramarital squeeze brought scandal upon Versailles. When it was announced that a Depp film would be opening the festival, murmurs of "Sacre bleu!" were heard far beyond the kingdom, though perhaps not so much in France: the festival itself has opened its arms wide to Depp, who hasn't exactly been untouched by controversy in the past few years, given his involvement in two high-profile defamation suits connected with allegations that he physically abused his former wife Amber Heard. (The jury ruled that Heard defamed Depp on three counts and awarded him $15 million in damages; Depp was found guilty of one of three charges in Heard's countersuit, and she was awarded $2 million in compensatory damages.) 

The allegations, and the details of the subsequent messy trials, are horrifying enough by themselves. The trollish Depp fans who took to social media to harass Heard and the women who stood by her made the situation uglier. You'd have to have been cryogenically frozen through most of 2022 to have missed it. Yet at the festival's opening press conference on May 15-the event just wrapped its 76th edition-Cannes chief Thierry Frémaux defended the festival's choice to kick off with the film. "If there's one person in this world who didn't find the least interest in this very publicized trial, it's me," he said. "I don't care what it's about. I care about Johnny Depp as an actor."