Paul Bettany says he hadn't spoken to Johnny Depp in years when texts reached court

Paul Bettany says he had not spoken to Johnny Depp in years when their private messages were read in court, and he has not spoken to him since.

Bettany addressed the episode in an interview with The Times published on 15 October, describing Depp's long legal saga as an "interesting time," according to E! News. He said coverage at the time painted him as a close friend of Depp, even though contact had lapsed well before the messages emerged, according to Variety. That distance is central to his account of why the court episode felt so uncomfortable.

Bettany and Depp knew each other from three films made together: The Tourist in 2010, Transcendence in 2014 and Mortdecai in 2015, according to Variety. Bettany has said he knew Depp before Depp's marriage to actor Amber Heard, rather than during it. By the time the old messages surfaced, he said, regular contact was already years in the past.

The messages themselves dated to 2013. They became public when they were read during a hearing in February 2020 as part of Depp's libel case in London. In one exchange, Depp wrote to Bettany: "Let's burn Amber!!!"

The language in the exchange referred to Heard and included further violent wording. Depp wrote about drowning her before burning her, and about what he would do to her burnt corpse afterwards, as reported by Reuters. The texts were raised in court because lawyers were examining the nature of Depp's relationship with Heard and the language used around that period.

That court case was a libel action, a lawsuit over a published claim said to be false and damaging to reputation. Depp had sued News Group Newspapers, publisher of The Sun, over an article headlined "Gone Potty – How can JK Rowling be 'genuinely happy' casting wife beater Johnny Depp in the new 'Fantastic Beasts' film?" In 2020, Judge Andrew Nicol ruled against Depp, according to Variety. The court found the description of Depp as a "wife-beater" to be substantially true, according to The Independent.

For Bettany, the result is a strange footnote. A brief run of messages from years earlier placed him inside one of the most publicised show-business disputes of recent years. His point now is simple. He was named as an insider in that dispute after the friendship itself had faded.