The once-celebrated hero of the Tinseltown hat game has been pretty quiet of late.
Johnny Depp has been staying out of the public eye amid his lengthy legal battle with ex-wife Amber Heard, but he also hasn’t appeared in many film or television projects. This is likely due to the allegations of abuse against him and Hollywood’s protestations that it’s finally done working with people who do that.
Depp’s last two big films were 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express and 2018’s Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (before he was let go by Warner Bros. and replaced in the third Fantastic Beasts with Mads Mikkelsen).
Depp has appeared in a few small projects since, but he’s mostly been relegated to voice work since the pandemic. In fact, he’s spent the past few years voicing Johnny Puff, the main character of Puffins, a Serbian-produced children’s animated series that released the entirety of its 250-episode run on Amazon and Apple TV Plus.
Technically, Puffins is a spinoff of the 2019 animated children’s movie Arctic Dogs, which featured a pretty robust voice cast including Jeremy Renner, Alec Baldwin, Heidi Klum, Anjelica Huston, James Franco, and Michael Madsen. If you don’t remember that movie at all, don’t worry: the film only earned $2.9 million from 2,844 theaters. According to Cartoon Brew, that tally makes Arctic Dogs the worst-performing film of all time across that many venues.
And yet, Dogs did well enough on streaming to earn a TV spinoff starring Depp, who likely appreciated the opportunity to continue acting while hiding from paparazzi in a sound booth. The actor also has lent his voice to another Puffins project — titled Puffins Impossible, which aired 21 episodes between 2021 and 2022.
What’s next for Johnny Depp?
Honestly, not much. The film everyone is calling his comeback vehicle, the French-language Jeanne Du Barry, has premiered at Cannes and played throughout France — but it hasn’t secured a U.S. release date yet. The film is set to stream on Netflix in France roughly one year from now, which could determine the timeline for its U.S. theatrical release by Vertical Entertainment. After that, the film likely will end up on Netflix’s stateside service as well.
The film stars actor/director Maïwenn, who plays a working-class woman in 18th-century France who climbs the social ladder and becomes King Louis XV’s lover. Depp portrays Louis the Beloved, alongside a supporting cast including Benjamin Lavernhe, Pierre Richard, Melvil Poupaud, and Pascal Greggory. The film got a seven-minute standing ovation at Cannes, which is one minute shorter than the festival’s applause for Clerks 2, mind you.
The only other thing listed as an upcoming project on Depp’s IMDb page is — you guessed it, more Puffins! Depp once again portrays Johnny Puff, a name we’ll never get tired of typing, in Johnny Puff: Secret Mission.
It’s likely that Depp’s team wants to see how U.S. audiences receive him in Jeanne Du Barry before trying to get him on the poster of a major film again. Of course, Disney has said it’s “noncommital” about bringing Depp back to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, meaning there could be some hope there. But according to Depp’s friends, he has no interest in taking Disney’s call after they dropped him so fast in 2018 when Heard accused him of being violent.
Still, you know what changes people’s minds and erases bad blood? Money. Keep a weathered eye on the horizon for Pirates 6: The Great Parlay.
