Yahoo Movies Amber Heard witness may have accidentally dropped Aquaman 2 spoilers at Johnny Depp trial
Warning: This article contains spoilers about Aquaman 2... maybe?
An expert witness appears to have let slip some spoilers from an early version of the Aquaman 2 script during testimony in Johnny Depp's defamation trial against Amber Heard.
While the former couple is in court for Depp's $50 million defamation lawsuit over a 2018 Washington Post op-ed that Heard wrote chronicling her experiences as a domestic violence survivor, the actress filed her own $100 million countersuit, claiming Depp and his legal team defamed her by calling her allegations false.
On Monday, entertainment industry consultant Kathryn Arnold took the stand to outline the damage Heard's team claims Depp's attorney, Adam Waldman, caused to Heard's career when he accused the actress of orchestrating an "abuse hoax" against Depp in a 2020 interview with the Daily Mail.
Part of that damage came in the form of Heard nearly losing her part in Aquaman 2, according to the defense. While she managed to keep the role, Heard previously testified she ended up appearing in a "very pared-down version" of the original story planned for her character Mera.
Heard tried to avoid spoilers about the upcoming sequel to 2018's Aquaman during her testimony, saying only that they "basically took a bunch out of my role," including an action sequence, but Arnold went further when recalling what Heard had told her about the changes to an early version of the script.
Jasin Boland/Warner Bros.
"I believe that in the first act of the movie, she was injured somehow, or it had something to do with a baby," Arnold teased in her testimony. In the comics, Aquaman (played in the film by Jason Momoa) and Queen Mera get married and have a son, Arthur Curry, Jr. (nicknamed, yes, Aquababy). Aquaman and Mera haven't tied the knot yet on the big screen.
Noting that she hasn't read any iterations of the script and is only relying on what Heard told her, Arnold elaborated that Mera "ends up in the hospital early in this new Aquaman 2 movie and doesn't really come out until the end to kind of wrap things up." She added, "All the interactions with Momoa's character, and certainly the action scenes, were taken out."
Arnold went on to lament that Heard "trained 5 hours a day for several months with the trainer to do this big action sequence" and didn't learn that her role shrunk until she arrived to set. "So [her role] was radically reduced from what it was in the script and what she even trained for while she was preparing for the movie," Arnold added.
In previous testimony, Heard's agent Jessica Kovacevic testified that Warner Bros. cited a "lack of chemistry" with Momoa as a reason for possibly recasting her role. However, Kovacevic told the court she believed the real reason that Warner Bros. wanted to replace Heard was due to the bad press pertaining to the split.Warner Bros. did not immediately respond to EW's request for comment.
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