Johnny Depp announced on Instagram that he will no longer play Gellert Grindelwald in the Harry Potter spinoff series Fantastic Beasts.
His Instagram post clarified that Warner Bros. asked him to “resign” from his role and that he “agreed to that request.”
Warner Bros. decision to ask Depp to abandon the role he has played in both Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald came less than a week after Depp lost a libel case against a newspaper that referred to him as a “wife beater” in the context of his ex-wife Amber Heard’s accusations of domestic violence. The article at the center of the libel case also encouraged Warner Bros. to drop Depp from the Fantastic Beasts series.
Depp’s leaked casting in the first Fantastic Beasts movie sparked backlash in 2016 because Heard’s domestic abuse accusations were already public knowledge. Some even called for his character to be recast in The Crimes of Grindelwald and were ignored by the studio and by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who defended Depp’s casting in a contentious statement.
In her statement, which dropped before The Crimes of Grindelwald premiered in theaters, Rowling wrote that “the filmmakers and I are not only comfortable sticking with our original casting, but genuinely happy to have Johnny playing a major character in the movies.”
It appears that at least the filmmakers have changed their mind about that particular opinion. The future of the Fantastic Beasts franchise remains in flux as the COVID-19 pandemic makes filming anything more difficult, expensive, and dangerous, but when and if the third movie comes out one thing is certain: Johnny Depp won’t be there.