Johnny Depp to return to Hollywood in ‘Day Drinker’ alongside Penelope Cruz
Johnny Depp is set to star in the new action movie, Day Drinker, directed by The Amazing Spider-Man and (500) Days of Summer director Marc Webb.
Co-starring Penélope Cruz, Day Drinker will be Depp’s first role in Hollywood following a string of personal controversies that grabbed headlines in recent years, most notably the messy and highly publicised court case involving his ex-wife, actor Amber Heard, in 2022.
Depp’s most recent big-budget film was 2019’s frontier drama, Waiting for the Barbarians, in which he shared the screen with Robert Pattinson and Mark Rylance. Since then, he’s been largely absent from cinemas, aside from voicing a puffin in several small animated features and playing Louis XV in the French period drama Jeanne du Barry in 2023. He also directed a period drama, Modi: Three Days on the Wing of Madness, that recently screened at the Rome Film Festival.
Day Drinkers will mark the beginning of what could be the actor’s Hollywood comeback after spending multiple years in industry exile in Europe.
The plot of the film follows a bartender and a day drinker who meet on a cruise ship and become embroiled in a criminal plot. Its producers are a who’s who of action blockbuster backers, including the producers behind the John Wick franchise, Fast X, and Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners.
It will also mark the fourth pairing of Depp and Cruz, who starred together in 2001’s Blow, 2011’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express.
Why did Johnny Depp stop making Hollywood movies?
Depp was one of the most celebrated actors in Hollywood for more than two decades. Oscar-nominated for three vastly different roles – the pirate Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean, the Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie in Finding Neverland, and the murderous musical barber in Sweeney Todd – he was known for his versatility and penchant for making unusual choices.
With movies like Edward Scissorhands, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, and Donnie Brasco, he proved that he was a magnetic young star in the mould of his hero, Marlon Brando, and when he made the transition to box office fame in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, his status as a global star seemed untouchable.
Nevertheless, even before his messy divorce from Heard, Depp’s career was beginning to backslide. By the mid-2010’s, rumours of substance abuse issues and financial struggles became louder, and he was suffering from a string of poorly received performances.
In 2016, Heard filed for divorce after one year of marriage and alleged that Depp had been physically and verbally abusive. In 2018, Depp brought a lawsuit against The Sun that called him a “wife beater,” which led to years of legal proceedings. The actor also sued his ex-wife in 2019 for defamation over a column she wrote in a newspaper about her experiences with domestic violence, and it was followed by a string of countersuits between the former spouses. A case finally went to trial in 2022 and was live-streamed for millions of spectate.
Although Depp won the suit, the messiness of the trial was devastating to his and Heard’s careers, with intimate details of their troubled relationship becoming fodder for social media feeds and speculation. Depp was quickly dropped from the Fantastic Beasts franchise and moved to Europe. He now has a lot riding on the success of Day Drinker, which is currently in pre-production.
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