Johnny Depp celebrates defamation trial win with Indian cuisine; shells out Rs 49 lakh

There’s no such thing as enough celebration of victory especially if it is as momentous as the one Johnny Depp has secured in the defamation case against ex-wife and Aquaman actor Amber Heard.  

The Hollywood star, known for playing Captain Jack Sparrow in the popular film series Pirates of the Caribbean, celebrated his win by inviting musician friend and guitarist Jeff Beck and 20 others friends to an elaborate Indian dinner at Varanasi Restaurant, a curry house in the UK’s Birmingham. Depp was in the UK since before the verdict and has also performed alongside Beck.  

The actor spent over $62,000 (almost Rs 49 lakh) for a celebratory Indian dinner with his friends on Sunday evening. Depp and his friends ordered butter chicken, chicken tikka, paneer tikka masala, lamb karahi, tandoori king prawns, curry, shish kebabs, cheesecake, cocktails and rosé Champagne, New York Post reported. The dinner ended with a simple cheesecake and panna cotta for dessert.  

The staff at the curry house called the actor a “very lovely, down-to-earth bloke”. The restaurant, spread in an area of 20,000 sq ft, was closed to ensure that Depp and his friends could eat in private and they left at around midnight., as per the report.  

Operations director at Varanasi Restaurant Mohammed Hussain told the news outlet, “We had a call out of the blue on Sunday afternoon saying that Johnny Depp wanted to come eat with a group of people.” 

He added, “I was shocked, and at first, I thought it might have been a wind up [joke]. But then his security team arrived [and] checked out the restaurant, and we let them have the whole place because we were concerned that he might be bothered by other diners.” 

About Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard

Both the actors met on the sets of the 2009 film The Rum Diary and started dating a couple of years later. At the time, Depp was in a relationship with Vanessa Paradis and Heard was seeing photographer Tasya Van Ree. Both of them called it quits with their respective partners and started dating each other in 2011.  

They were engaged in 2014 and got hitched in 2015 at Depp’s private island in Bahamas. In a shocking development, Heard filed for divorce in 2016 and she claimed that Depp physically abused her under the influence of drugs and alcohol. He denied these allegations and accused Heard of trying to “secure a premature financial resolution by alleging abuse.” The divorce got finalized in 2017.  

Post this, Heard wrote a piece in the Washington Post in 2018 wherein she claimed that she was a survivor of domestic violence and did not name Depp. She wrote, “I spoke up against sexual violence—and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change.” 

After this piece grabbed international headlines, Depp sued Heard for defamation. He was awarded $10.35 million in damages by the jury-- $10 million in compensatory damages and $350,000 in punitive damages. 

(With New York Post inputs) 

Also read: Jury sides with Johnny Depp in libel case; awards him $15 mn