Here's Johnny! The return of a Hollywood star too big to cancel

After a spectacular fall from grace, Johnny Depp will play Scrooge — a cruel man forced to reckon with his past. Alexi Mostrous reports on a startling comeback

- Alexi Mostrous

In 2018, Johnny Depp was in trouble. The Hollywood star had spent much of the $650m he had earned and was suing his longtime business manager, Joel Mandel, for fraud. He fired his agent, Tracey Jacobs, who had represented him for 30 years, and befriended a little-known lawyer called Adam Waldman, who had encouraged him to file suit against Mandel (the parties later settled).

Depp was once Hollywood's best-paid actor, with three Oscar nominations, but there were rumours his drug and alcohol use were affecting his work. That December, Disney dropped him from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

There were also the accusations of physical abuse, first levelled by Depp’s former wife, Amber Heard, in 2016. Depp denied the allegations but they added to the image of a once great actor at a low ebb.

“He was all over the place,” one Hollywood insider told me. “It was difficult to see how he could recover.”

In Depp’s words, Heard’s allegations turned him from “Cinderella to Quasimodo in 0.6 seconds”. Seven years later, Depp has been given another chance to go to the ball. Last month it was reported he will play Ebenezer Scrooge in a major studio production due out next year. Depp will play the Dickens miser who is offered a chance of redemption, alongside Andrea Riseborough and Ian McKellen. It will be his first major studio movie since Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald in 2018.

The 62-year-old star of Edward Scissorhands and Donnie Brasco is slowly transmogrifying from a #MeToo villain back into a bankable star. It’s a rehabilitation that speaks to how power and reputation work in Hollywood, and how the fall and rise of a star links into wider social movements outside even his control.

Johnny Depp is back. The question is: how did this happen?

The scale of the disgrace