Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow
After “a month and almost 200 e-mails,” Rolling Stone writer Stephen Rodrick succumbed to an interview with Johnny Depp at his London home to discuss how the 55-year-old actor lost nearly all of his $650M fortune. The piece was devised by his lawyer in an effort to put Depp and his financial woes in a positive light, instead Rodrick compared Depp to a late-stage Marlon Brando and detailed the eccentricities he witnessed over a 72-hour period. The longform interview is a brutal portrait of a man who’s suing the people who once handled his money.
It’s estimated that Depp has made $650 million on films that netted $3.6 billion. Almost all of it is gone. He’s suing The Management Group, run by his longtime business manager, Joel Mandel, and his brother Robert for negligence, breach of fiduciary duty and fraud…
The Mandels categorically deny all wrongdoing and are countersuing, alleging that Depp breached his oral contract with the company. The suit suggests that Depp has a $2-million-a-month compulsory-spending disorder, offering bons mots like “Wine is not an investment if you drink it as soon as you buy it.”…
Rodrick’s interview with Depp was published Wednesday and by Friday Deadline was reporting that it did him no favors in an article titled, Johnny Depp Loses Bid To Delay $25M Fraud Trial On Heels Of Train Wreck Rolling Stone Profile.
They describe Depp’s legal troubles as so:
Now battling ex-bodyguards who claim drug abuse and owed pay and a countersuit from his former longtime attorney too, Depp first sued The Management Group back in January 2017.
At the time and since, the actor alleged that despite making hundreds of millions of dollars he was feeling the financial pinch because of having been swindled in the Hollywood accounting shell game by those trusted and the much respected TMG.
The Management Group swung back with a countersuit of their own on the last day of the first month of 2017 over unpaid commissions and tales of excess and irresponsibility, to put it very mildly, that proclaimed that the up tp $20 million a picture plus a share of profits actor’s spending habits were the real cause of his apparently emptying bank accounts. Among the various residences, dozens of vehicles, tens of thousands a month on wine, guitar collection, artwork, hangers-on, sibling provisions, security, acting assistants and other indulgences, TMG’s reaction revealed that the Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas star paid out $3 million to have Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes shoot out of a cannon in 2005 and forks out more $2-million in monthly expenses.
About that cannon, from the Rolling Stone article:
Depp says they got the Hunter S. Thompson cannon story wrong too. “By the way, it was not $3 million to shoot Hunter into the fucking sky,” says Depp. “It was $5 million.”
Oof.
Three all-nighters in London with Johnny Depp, co-starring a Russian oligarch's lawyer, hash, the #metoo movement, Don Rickles' ghost, and millions gone forever. How a Hollywood icon found himself at a dead end. https://t.co/nx5BCFU5FI
— Stephen Rodrick (@stephenrodrick) June 21, 2018
Read: Rolling Stone‘s The Trouble With Johnny Depp