The actor said the incident happened during an argument prompted by him attempting to get Heard to agree to sign a post-nuptial agreement.
REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/Pool
Johnny Depp testified that a "normal finger" was added to his hand while filming "Pirates of the Caribbean" in 2015 after he said his ex-wife Amber Heard threw a vodka bottle at him, which severed his middle finger.
The 58-year-old actor took the stand in a county court in Fairfax, Virginia, on Wednesday as part of his defamation suit against Heard, accusing her of ruining his reputation and career by saying she was a victim of domestic violence.
Heard has countersued Depp for $100 million and denied the claims in his lawsuit, claiming he did physically abuse her multiple times throughout their relationship.
"There was a bandage on it the whole time," Depp said of his finger. "And what I had to do was wear — there's a special effects trick they had planned. Basically, whatever bandage I had on, they would put little green dots on the splint or whatever, the bandages. So in post-production, they could use what's called computer-generated imagery, CGI, to erase the bandage and replace with it a normal finger. And that's how we finished the film."
The actor said the incident happened during an argument prompted by him attempting to get Heard to agree to sign a post-nuptial agreement in early March 2015.
Depp said the stress of the argument prompted him to drink shots of vodka in the home he and Heard were staying in while filming the fifth installment of the franchise, "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales," in Australia.
Depp then said Heard followed him to the home's bar, yelled at him for drinking again, and threw two bottles at him, one of which made contact with his hand and sliced off his middle right finger.
"It made contact, and it shattered everywhere," he said. "I honestly didn't feel the pain at first, what I felt was heat, and I felt as if something were dripping down my hand. Then I looked down and realized that the tip of my finger had been severed, and I was looking directly at my bones sticking out and the meaty portion of the inside of your finger."
Depp said he initially lied to doctors about how the tip of his middle right finger had been severed because he didn't want Heard to get "in trouble."
"I didn't want to disclose that it had been Ms. Heard that had thrown a vodka bottle at me and then took my finger off," he testified Wednesday. "I didn't want to get her in trouble. I tried to just keep things as copacetic and easy as possible for everyone. I didn't want to put her into that mix."
Heard painted a different story of the night of the incident, saying the fight was caused by her witnessing Depp take out a bag of MDMA when he was "supposed to be clean at the time." She accused Depp of shoving her, choking her, and throwing objects and alcohol at her. She claimed Depp cut his finger by himself by "slamming a hard plastic phone against the wall."
"I did not throw a vodka bottle — or any other kind of bottle — at Johnny, not did I cause that injury to Johnny's finger," she wrote in a statement in response to Depp's lawsuit.
