“Listen, I was a little skeptical too when I first heard about it,” Megan Davis, the actress playing Heard, says in an Entertainment Weekly interview, “It’s a topic you want to treat with such respect, and the problem, I think, with the trial is that people see themselves in both.”
If anything, the actress was even more inspired to take the role when she witnessed the hatred and backlash Heard had received from social media in the duration of the trial. “It was more the vitriol that made me want to play her, because it breaks my heart when we can’t see that people are human beings.” Davis adds, “Everyone was very much a believer in portraying [Heard] as a real human being and her truth as fairly as his truth, and that made me feel comfortable even though it was such a short time frame.”
Mark Hapka, who plays Depp in the film, explains he knew the movie was still going to go through it with or without him. In an attempt to remain vigilant and neutral above all things, the actor shared that he and his co-star, Davis, made a pact and it was Davis who said, “I’m going to fully protect Amber, and you’re going to fully protect Johnny.” The neutrality they speak of means taking responsibility for the roles they have chosen to go through and that is by ‘bringing authenticity to the testimonies’ by focusing on the mannerisms and listening to the courtroom testimonies of Depp and Heard, instead of appearing to be ‘cosplaying’ or ‘making impressions’ of the said trial.
This trial involved unveiling trauma and domestic abuse between two people and it is rather difficult to portray this in dramatized form without disrespecting the people involved, as well as the survivors who had similar experiences. But Davis vocalizes her sentiment, “To those people, what I’d want them to know is, I believe, based on all of my conversations with producers and directors and the studios involved in this project, that no one would come into this wanting anything other than to try and portray the truth as best as possible from two sides where we still aren’t even sure what happened.” Also Read: Amber Heard’s Agent Says DC Star Should’ve Been a Bigger Deal After Aquaman
