NEED TO KNOW
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Johnny Depp said in a new interview with The Telegraph that he felt Warner Bros. “wanted me to retire” when he was asked to step down from his villain role in the Fantastic Beasts movies in 2020
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The actor said his time portraying the character Gellert Grindelwald “literally stopped in a millisecond, like, while I was doing the movie,” after he lost a libel case against the U.K,’s The Sun in November 2020 over a 2018 story that described him as a “wife-beater”
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Mads Mikkelsen took over Depp’s role as Grindelwald in 2022’s The Secrets of Dumbledore; the Harry Potter spinoff series has not produced any movies since
Johnny Depp is addressing the chain of events that led to Mads Mikkelsen taking over his villain role in the Harry Potter spinoff series Fantastic Beasts.
In Depp’s interview with The Telegraph, published on Saturday, July 5 surrounding his latest directorial effort, Modi: Three Days on the Wing of Madness, the actor said that his time portraying the character Gellert Grindelwald in the Fantastic Beasts movies “literally stopped in a millisecond, like, while I was doing the movie,” in the fall of 2020 when he stepped down from the role.
“They said we’d like you to resign. But what was really in my head was they wanted me to retire,” Depp told the outlet.
Back in November 2020, Depp announced that he was resigning from portraying Grindelwald in the Fantastic Beasts movies days after he lost his libel case against The Sun newspaper over its 2018 story describing him as a “wife-beater” during his marriage to Amber Heard.
“I wish to let you know that I have been asked to resign by Warner Bros. from my role as Grindelwald in Fantastic Beasts and I have respected and agreed to that request,” Depp said at the time.
When asked for his response to being pushed out of the role, Depp told The Telegraph, “F— you. There’s far too many of me to kill. If you think you can hurt me more than I’ve already been hurt you’re gravely mistaken.”
PEOPLE is out to Warner Bros. for comment.
Depp made his debut as Grindelwald at the very end of 2016’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, a spinoff of the main Harry Potter franchise that starred Eddie Redmayne as the eccentric magical zoologist Newt Scamander. The series, which released three movies between 2016 and 2022, followed Newt’s run-ins with the evil wizard Grindelwald and Albus Dumbledore’s (Jude Law) efforts to confront the villain across the world in the 1920s and 1930s.
Depp reprised the part in 2018’s The Crimes of Grindelwald, and after he resigned, Danish actor Mikkelsen, 59, stepped in to play the part in 2022’s The Secrets of Dumbledore. Depp, who subsequently remained in the news through 2022 for his defamation trial against ex-wife Heard, 39, has only acted sparingly since then: the 2023 French film Jeanne du Barry is his only live-action role since 2020.
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Elisabetta A. Villa/WireImage
Johnny Depp on Oct. 26, 2024
Further Fantastic Beasts sequels do not appear likely. The series’ director David Yates described the series as “just parked” during a 2023 interview, and Law, 52, said he believes those films are “certainly on hold” now that HBO is developing a remake of the original Harry Potter books.
Depp’s new movie Modi: Three Days on the Wings of Madness releases in the U.K. July 11. The movie does not yet have a U.S. theatrical release date.
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