The director says her character was never intended to feature in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, the studio claims a lack of chemistry – but fans can’t help but suspect the actor’s public shaming is to blame for her greatly reduced role

Ben Child@BenChildGeekMon 30 Oct 2023 12.56 GMT

What’s the truth about Amber Heard and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom? Was her widely-mooted leading role in the movie reduced because she had no chemistry with Jason Momoa’s sometime king of Atlantis? Or was it due to the media furore surrounding her legal battles with Johnny Depp, as the actor herself testified at trial in May last year?

Either way, we know that the second (and most likely final) solo Aquaman does not focus on Heard’s Mera, but instead a messy, shoehorned bromance between Aquaman and his half-brother, Patrick Wilson’s Orm. It is a weird storyline, given this pair spent most of the previous movie hating on each other, but that doesn’t mean it was only cooked up so Warner Bros could push Heard out of the picture. Aquaman has reportedly had numerous reshoots, but surely they didn’t involve changing the whole plot of the movie?

Interviewed in Empire magazine ahead of the sequel’s December release, director James Wan once again rolled out what has clearly become the studio line on Heard’s relegation to a minor role. Commenting on the actor’s suggestions that she had originally been due to play a bigger part in the follow-up to 2018’s $1bn-grossing Aquaman, the Saw director argued he always intended the sequel to go a different way.

“It’s fair that she [Heard] said that, because she wasn’t in my head as I was working on this movie,” said Wan, diplomatically. “Actors don’t necessarily know what we behind the scenes are thinking about. But this was always my plan. From the start, I pitched that the first film would be a Romancing the Stone-type thing – an action-adventure romantic comedy – while the second would be an outright buddy comedy. I wanted to do Tango & Cash!

If ropey performances were a problem, why are the equally wooden Nicole Kidman and Temuera Morrison both returning?

“Jason plays Arthur larger-than-life; Patrick plays the straight man. It’s not unlike what Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones did in Men In Black,” added the director.

So wherein lies the truth? Even Heard’s most hardcore fans would struggle to argue other than that her performance in the original Aquaman was a little bloodless; a CGI-fuelled nullity. But whether this was really the actor’s fault, given she was on screen to provide a foil to Momoa’s boisterous fish-blokey heroics, and not much more, is open to question. Moreover, if ropey performances in Wan’s film always led to cast members being downgraded for the sequel, you would have to wonder why the equally wooden Nicole Kidman and Temuera Morrison are both returning as the King of the Seven Seas’ mum and dad. Despite Aquaman’s impressive box office return, it is not exactly a film known for its performances.

Variety reported that Warner wanted to drop Heard from the sequel because of her lack of chemistry with Momoa, and sent a letter to her lawyer to this effect in 2019, so there is clearly some evidence for that claim. Former DC Films chief Walter Hamada also testified in the 2022 defamation trial that there was an “issue of chemistry”.

But nobody else involved in Aquaman – an incredibly successful film lest we forget, despite all DC’s travails since 2018 – has been sidelined in the full glare of the media. No one else has been so publicly shamed – for which fans of the actor’s ex-husband are largely responsible, of course. Wherever you stand on the Heard-Depp cubic curve, and whether you think the actor was an asset to DC or not, things feel … wrong. Perhaps it’s to be expected given the subject matter, but there’s definitely something fishy going on.