Less than one year after Johnny Depp’s public trial against his ex-wife, Amber Heard, came to an end, the actor will open Cannes Film Festival with his new film, Jeanne du Barry.
Jeanne du Barry, French actress and director Maïwenn Le Besco’s sixth film, will hold its world premiere screening at the 76th annual Cannes Film Festival on May 16, the festival announced Wednesday. The film tells the story of King Louis XV’s lover and “favourite,” Jeanne du Barry. Director Le Besco—known professionally under the mononym Maïwenn—also takes the lead role. Depp will speak in French throughout the film, Deadline reports, adding that this film marks the first time the actor has done so.
Although Depp plays Louis XV, the actor’s rapport with his on-screen lover were reportedly less than harmonious during the film’s production. In December, comments surfaced about Jeanne du Barry’s alleged behind-the-scenes tumult from a French television episode that had aired months earlier. Actor Bernard Montiel had appeared on a French talk show, Touche pas à mon poste! (Don’t Touch My TV Set!), in October, and shared that Depp and Maïwenn were not getting along. (Jeanne du Barry marks Depp’s first feature film role in three years, Deadline notes.)
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“I’ve heard some noise from the shoot, very serious stuff,” Montiel said on the show in October. “So, [Depp is] an excellent actor, when he comes on set, except sometimes at six in the morning the crew is ready, and nobody turns up. So of course, Maïwenn, who is the director, gets angry, and the next day she’s the one who doesn’t turn up. And you’ve got Johnny Depp, and she’s not there. It’s finished, over this week, [but] it's going very, very badly. They don’t get on at all; they’re screaming at each other the whole time.”
Depp’s allegedly acrimonious relationship with time has also come up before. During his defamation trial last year against Amber Heard, the actor’s former agent, Tracey Jacobs, testified that his career suffered in its latter years thanks, in part, to “the reputation that he’d acquired due to his lateness and other things.” Years before that, in 2017, sources told The Hollywood Reporter that during the 2015 production of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Depp’s “constant lateness on set … often left hundreds of extras waiting for hours at a time.”
Maïwenn won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2011 for her crime drama Polisse. In 2015, the director’s film My King won Emmanuelle Bercot Best Actress at Cannes, after earning eight Cesar award nominations. According to Cannes’ synopsis (originally written in French), Jeanne du Barry follows “a young working-class woman hungry for culture and pleasure,” who “uses her intelligence and allure to climb the rungs of the social ladder one by one.” She and Louis XV fall in love, and he “regains through her his appetite for life.”
No North American release has been announced for Jeanne du Barry, although Netflix has opted to distribute the film in France.
When news first broke last January that Depp would star in Jeanne du Barry, he had just wrapped up (and lost) his libel case against News Group Newspapers for a headline in The Sun that called him a “wife beater.” Last summer, however, a Virginia jury found Heard liable for defaming Depp in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed while also deciding in Heard’s favor on three counterclaims. (At the time, Ruth Glenn—president and CEO of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence—told The Daily Beast that the outcome was “the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen.”)
It didn’t take long after last year’s verdict for Depp’s comeback to begin coming together. In June, just as the jury’s decision made news, an unnamed ex-Disney exec chatted with People magazine about the prospect of his return to the Pirates franchise. In July, Netflix announced that it would stream Jeanne du Barry in France. In August, Depp staged a surprise cameo at the MTV Video Music Awards, and by November, he was making a special appearance in Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty fashion show.
Depp’s reach remains limited in certain ways—no major production in the U.S. has cast him since 2020, when he starred in the biopic Minamata—but with each new round of publicity comes the possibility that he could, one day, make his way back into Hollywood. If social media “likes” are anything to go on, he’s got plenty of A-list supporters. As Depp makes his way to Cannes, it’s hard not to wonder what might come next.
