Johnny Depp: "I was as low as I believe I could have gotten" after money and marital problems
Johnny Depp says he was a wreck after money and marital problems hit at once. In a wide-ranging interview with Rolling Stone, Depp hinted that he was close to suicidal.
"I was as low as I believe I could have gotten," the actor told Rolling Stone. "The next step was, 'You're going to arrive somewhere with your eyes open and you're going to leave there with your eyes closed.' I couldn't take the pain every day."
At the time, Depp was battling his former business managers, alleging that they mismanaged $400 million of his money throughout a lucrative period of his career. He sued them last year for $25 million; the lawsuit is ongoing. Depp was also coming off the heels of his divorce from ex-wife Amber Heard, who accused him of domestic violence in 2016. They finalized their divorce later in 2016 and Heard donated her entire $7 million divorce settlement to charity to help domestic violence victims.
The actor said that he coped with his demons by drinking and writing his memoir.
"I poured myself a vodka in the morning and started writing until the tears filled my eyes and I couldn't see the page anymore," he said as he shed tears. "I kept trying to figure out what I'd done to deserve this. I'd tried being kind to everyone, helping everyone, being truthful to everyone ... The truth is most important to me. And all this still happened."
Depp was not able to comment specifically on his divorce with Heard due to a nondisclosure agreement, but he did talk about his legal battle with his business manager, The Management Group (TMG), run by brothers Robert and Joel Mandel. Depp said that the brothers cost him $6 million in fees after they failed to pay his taxes on time for 13 years; the Mandels hit back that they were not able to pay the taxes on time because Depp was cash poor. Depp also complained that the Mandels paid his sister $7 million and his assistant $750,000 without telling him, and let his family in Kentucky spend exorbitant amounts of money.
However, Depp also bragged to Rolling Stone that TMG's countersuit lowballed some of his purchases. He said, "It's insulting to say that I spent $30,000 on wine because it was far more."
He also added that they got the price of shooting writer Hunter S. Thompson's ashes into the sky wrong.
"By the way, it was not $3 million to shoot Hunter into the f**king sky," he said. "It was $5 million."