In May, the nation watched the defamation trial between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard with rapt attention; now, Tubi has adapted that event into a film titled Hot Take: The Depp/Heard Trial.
In the film, Johnny Depp and Amber Heard are played by Mark Hapka and Megan Davis, respectively; Davis tells PEOPLE that she had no preconceived notions going into the job because she had not seen the trial or any of Heard’s films before being cast.
Davis told Janine Rubenstein of the PEOPLE Everyday podcast, “I had not seen anything she had done.” The film All the Boys Love Mandy Lane was not on my radar. Neither Aquaman nor the trial had previously been on my radar.
She continued by saying that she had to rehearse significantly for the trial scenes than for the dramatizations of some of the former couple’s more tense personal moments and that this was true even after she had caught up on the background information.
That they both have their problems is obvious. …she explained. To put it simply, you have the actual video at a trial. Therefore, you hope to nail it, and you have to fix it. As for the reenactments, you can only assume their spirit and personality will be captured accurately, given that no actual footage exists.
When asked by Rubenstein how the public’s interest in the legal battle between Depp and Heard affected him as an actor, Hapka admitted that it did.
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In his own words, “I felt terrible seeing the social media’s reaction to the trial because I thought like these are two genuine human people,” which is why he was intrigued by the film in the first place. Why? Because as artists of any stripe, the best we can aim for is to sow the seeds of empathy where they may not have been planted before.
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