Amber Heard Is Nobody’s Victim
I think Amber Heard may be ghosting me. We are talking on the phone about her new film Aquaman, in which she reprises the role of flame-haired warrior queen Mera, when all of a sudden the line goes dead. I was asking if she had been wary of joining a DC superhero franchise back in 2017, when she first took on the role in Justice League. Yes, she says, but while reading the comic book source material, she was pleasantly surprised to see that Mera flinches at being referred to as Aquawoman. “She says, ‘Hey, wait a second. I have my own name. My name is Mera,’” Heard, 32, recalls. “And I thought, That’s my kind of girl. I like her.”
Of course superhero territory comes with its occupational hazards: weightlifting, martial arts training, grueling days on set. “You have to maintain a vigorous imagination while being suspended 25 feet in the air, acting with very little around you that resembles the world that will be depicted when it comes out,” Heard says. This goes doubly for a movie in which much of the action takes place undersea alongside battle-ready sharks. And after eight months of filming, she’s relieved to not have to spend 45 minutes every day suctioning herself into Mera’s green piscine costume. “I’m not gagging to get back in that suit,” she says.
And that’s when the call drops off. “Amber?” She doesn’t resurface. Nobody can reach her.
The next morning, in a car en route from the Dallas airport, she apologizes profusely. She wasn’t ghosting me, she promises. Her phone died, and then she was busy writing a speech in support of Democratic representative turned Senate hopeful Beto O’Rourke. Oh. In that case, carry on.
The charismatic candidate is the reason for her last-minute trip to her native Texas. Later that afternoon Heard will deliver a rousing speech at a local amphitheater. “I trust straight-talking people,” she says to the crowd. “Like me, Beto comes from a background that recognizes hard work.”
Heard’s own hard work started early. Living outside Austin, her family didn’t have a lot of money. When she wanted to compete in beauty competitions, she’d go around to local small businesses to raise money for promotional material. (“Pageants are weird,” she admits when I ask how she feels about it now, “and I can’t support the objectification.”) Her dad, David, who worked construction and broke horses in his free time, didn’t look favorably upon his daughter’s hobby. “I was his hunting and fishing buddy,” Heard says. “When I was 12, I was struggling to stay on a bucking horse that was particularly unhappy about the arrangement. I spotted a little patch of grass, and I leapt. It didn’t just take the look on my dad’s face to put me back in the saddle. But that helped.”
By the time she was a teenager, she was bored by “conservative, God-fearin’ Texas” and became instead what she calls an “obstinate, bisexual, vegan atheist. I guess you could say I had my own things to rebel against.” She did some modeling, finished high school early, and hightailed it to Los Angeles at 17. “I would audition for everything, from Hot Girl Number 3 at Party to Daughter Leaving for College,” she recalls. “I would go around, a lot of times by city bus. I’d sit toward the back and change underneath my jacket.”
Beauty Chameleon: “Makeup is like any tool: It’s how you use it,” says Heard, who is a global ambassador for L’Oréal Paris.
Joos Tricot turtleneck, $395. Givenchy earring, $690 for pair. The M Jewelers hoop, $40 for pair.
Proud to Be Loud: “My job provides me with a platform,” Heard says. “Silence is complacency.”
Diane von Furstenberg turtleneck, $328. Brinker & Eliza earring, $108 for pair. SVNR earring, $125. For her bold lip try L’Oréal Paris Infallible Le Rouge in Ravishing Red ($10, lorealparisusa.com).
She graduated from nameless characters but never strayed too far from playing hot girls. After getting her start playing a football player’s girlfriend in the 2004 film Friday Night Lights, she’s rarely been offered a role that doesn’t dwell on her sex appeal. As an international spy and assassin, she dons latex before kicking ass alongside Kevin Costner (3 Days to Kill). As a New York Times crime reporter, she spends most of her time getting kinky with James Franco (The Adderall Diaries). Projects that nominally attempt to subvert this image (All the Boys Love Mandy Lane or, more recently, London Fields) were strictly indie fare.
But Heard sees each role as a triumph in its own right. “I’ve done the best I could without the luxury of being picky,” she says. “There’s an implicit apology expected of me for my participation in feminine beauty, but I can’t play into this false narrative that my sexuality is mutually exclusive from my power. My physical appearance, no matter how it affects others, is solely the responsibility of people around me. You know, male characters in movies included. It is their responsibility, not a woman’s. My sexuality, my femininity, in whatever way I want to express it, is mine and my own.”
Most important: Each job got Heard to the next level, and nine years into her career, that bus hustle was a distant memory. For one thing, she now owned her dream car, a ’68 Mustang that she was working to restore. Heard was also dating a man whose fame preexisted her birth. She’d met Johnny Depp in 2009 on the set of The Rum Diary; six years later they wed at their home in L.A., then had a larger wedding on his private island in the Bahamas. Assuming anybody still believed in fairy tales, this might sound like one. It wasn’t. In 2016, after 15 months of marriage, Heard split with the 55-year-old Pirates of the Caribbean star amid allegations of domestic abuse. In 2017, Depp agreed to pay her a $7 million divorce settlement, which she donated to the ACLU and the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles; he continues to deny the abuse accusations vehemently.
Heard never utters her ex’s name during our conversation. “I’ve seen her rise from such despair and darkness,” says longtime friend Amanda de Cadenet, founder of Girlgaze, a digital platform for female creatives, for which Heard contributed an emotional PSA shortly before her divorce was finalized. “There’s a lot of shit she can’t talk about.” Heard does, however, speak to what it means to be a survivor in the broader sense. “When a woman comes forward, she will be met with skepticism, hostility, and shame,” she says. “All a man has to do is point to an incentive. He will. Or society will.”
Her perspective, coupled with President Trump’s election, added fuel to her passion for activism. “My job provides me with a platform,” she says. “Silence is complacency.” And the people in the trenches have noticed her efforts. “I’ve never seen someone as fired up as Amber,” says 2019 Nobel Peace Prize nominee and Rise founder Amanda Nguyen, who helped create The Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights. The two met in New York several months ago. “It was supposed to be an hour-long dinner—it turned into six,” she recalls. “We discussed at length the process of how bills become law, how a coalition builds, how to shape your narrative to persuade people from different aisles. It really does go beyond showing up at events. Amber has a true desire to learn how to change the laws and change the world.”
And in September, like most of us, Heard watched Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I was in my hotel room in New York, and I was immediately nailed to the floor in a puddle of tears,” she says. “We as women took a collective punch to the gut.” A week later she joined Rise and a group of survivors in D.C. to appeal to Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, the only Republican on the committee who lobbied for an FBI investigation into Ford’s allegations. “It took a moment for him to realize I did not want a selfie with him,” she says. “I thanked him. I told him that in my life I have done the unpopular thing: go up against a powerful system. It takes grace and bravery; it can feel lonely and terrifying.” A week later Sen. Flake voted to confirm Kavanaugh. “He chose not to face it, I guess. And the results are…,” her voice wavers. “I guess you can see the results.”
But Heard doesn’t feel hopeless; she knows that not all fights are won overnight. Not all politicians are heroes or villains. Not all female underwater superheroes are Aquawomen. And she embraces those contradictions. Her stardom may reinforce Hollywood’s status quo: white, blond, gorgeous. But she’s dead set on reframing the story told about her. Heard specifically joined social media at the end of 2016 because she was tired of being the only one “not weighing in on the narrative of my life,” she says.
She’s also eager to weigh in on the issues she knows, like wage disparity. “We get paid less as women, and we end up spending more time on set, because of hair and makeup demands,” she says. Was she not equitably compensated for Aquaman? “No, no, no,” she insists. “I’m trying to elucidate a bigger point, which is that we’re working in an inherently flawed system.”
Heard is trying to work within that system as best she can; the bonus of starring in a franchise film like Aquaman is what comes after the franchise film. For her this means getting to stretch new muscles as a nineties-era punk rocker in Her Smell, opposite Elisabeth Moss and Cara Delevingne. Her role is small, but she says, “it was incredibly inspiring to work with more than one or two quote-unquote token females.” This year she also became a global ambassador for L’Oréal Paris (“I feel lucky to be aligned with a brand associated with the empowerment of women,” she says).
When I ask her to name someone whose career she admires, she steers the conversation away from actors to people like Palestinian American activist Yasmeen Mjalli, who’s bringing the #MeToo movement to the West Bank, and Stanford University law professor Michele Dauber, who supported “Emily Doe” in the Stanford rape case. “It’s those women who deserve the spotlight,” she says. “I am humbled just to amplify their voices.”
But what if people don’t want another actress turned activist? What if the impassioned speech on behalf of O’Rourke fails to budge conservative Texas voters? What if Hollywood never stops asking its female leads to wriggle into unforgiving latex suits?
Heard throws it all back to that “patch of grass” from her youth. “You gotta get back on the horse,” she says. “’Cause the only thing worse than being thrown off is giving up on trying.”
Phoebe Reilly is a writer living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in New York, Rolling Stone, and Elle magazines.
