Johnny Depp opens up on how ‘Fantastic Beasts' made him ‘retire'

Johnny Depp just came clean about his exit from the Fantastic Beasts franchise.

While promoting his directorial project, Modi: Three Days on the Wing of Madness, he made comments on being made to drop his role of Gellert Grindelwald, the antagonist of the movie.

In 2020, after he lost a high-profile case against The Sun over claims of domestic abuse to Amber Heard, he said that the studio’s request for his resignation from the Harry Potter spin-off series felt like a push into retirement

“It literally stopped in a millisecond, like, while I was doing the movie. They said, ‘We’d like you to resign.’ But what was really in my head was, they wanted me to retire,” the Pirates of the Caribbean star said.

Depp had filmed one scene for the third part of the franchise, The Secrets of Dumbledore, before Warner Bros. asked him to leave.

Even though the actor announced his exit as something which was “respected and agreed” upon, now, providing hindsight, his private reaction was less diplomatic. “F**k you. There’s far too many of me to kill. If you think you can hurt me more than I’ve already been hurt, you’re gravely mistaken,” he said.

Describing how the fallout from the court case impacted his career, he mentioned how he was “shunned, dumped, booted, deep-sixed, cancelled, however you want to define it.”

After Johnny Depp’s departure from the Fantastic Beasts franchise, Mads Mikkelsen was cast as Gellert Grindelwald, who, at that time stated, replacing Depp was “intimidating,” calling him “an amazing actor.”