For Johnny, who has maintained he never assaulted Amber, their nuptials were like a shotgun wedding without a baby. In the lead-up to the wedding, Bruce Witkin was spending time with Johnny in the recording studio. He remembered Johnny saying Amber wanted to get married quickly because they were both going away on film shoots. “She wanted to get it over with. [Depp’s sister] Christi was there and we both told him, so what? You don’t have to do it. Don’t do it. We were trying to tell him—don’t do this until you get a prenup. And Johnny kind of says to Christi, ‘Well you tell her.’ Christi cried and tried to convince Johnny not to go ahead with it. I tried to convince him too.” But Amber insisted. She wanted to get married before Johnny started filming the next Pirates of the Caribbean film, which required an intensive six-month shoot in Australia, where Johnny would have to live full-time. Amber said she was seeking stability by formalizing their union, but Johnny’s camp saw the expeditious wedding plans differently. According to Johnny’s assistant Nathan, “When they were married, Amber would get half of all he’d make on his films. So she wanted to be married before the next Pirates film.” (Heard did not respond to the authors’ interview requests during the book-writing process, but she later testified that the wedding was moved to avoid scheduling delays.) Amber was always nice and charming to them, even if they felt she was a bit “off.” It took a while for Stephen to catch on to the problems in her and Johnny’s relationship, but he eventually started to pick up on the signs of trouble: the little arguments, the snide remarks. Early on in their relationship, Johnny told Stephen he was worried he might wake up in the middle of the night and she’d be straddling him with a knife. “He’d make sort of offhand comments like that, you know?” Stephen said. “He doesn’t like to moan, or whine or complain. He doesn’t like to show fear. So he would say things like that to me, but kind of giggle.” During the lawsuits that would later come, Stephen tried to tell Johnny’s lawyers about an even more alarming incident, but he could never nail down the precise date. He and Johnny were at the Infinitum Nihil office on Melrose going over work matters. “I could tell he wasn’t really listening to me, which in and of itself, isn’t that uncommon,” Stephen said with a laugh. “He would often drift off when I was talking about work. But something was different this time, and he was looking down at his shoes. And I just said, ‘Are you ok? What’s up?’ And he just sort of looked at me, touched his head, and he had a loose clump of hair on his head and there was a little bit of blood on it. And he went, ‘That was 2 am.’ This time he wasn’t laughing.” Most of the people in Johnny’s life were aware of the red flags in the relationship. Whenever Amber traveled with Johnny, his team always rented out an extra hotel room in case a fight broke out and they needed to be sent to their own corners. “It was hard to see, because we knew him in his prior relationships and it was never like that. Voices weren’t raised. It was such a stark difference with Amber,” Gina said. “But if that’s what they want, then you’re going to support them and you’re going to hope that it works out, and hope they find peace and happiness.” “Do you really want to do this?” Malcolm asked him in his gravelly Scottish accent. “No man, I don’t,” Johnny replied. Malcolm remembered Johnny had a look on his face that said it all. “Get back in the truck,” Malcolm said. “We’ll fucking drive to Vegas and we’ll talk about it in Vegas, and we’ll fucking face the music after. Get in the truck.” But Johnny wouldn’t get in. “No. No, I can’t. I wouldn’t do that.” And with that, they turned and walked inside. “I had him for two seconds, you know,” Malcolm said. “He didn’t have a best man except for [his son] Jack and he’s just a kid. He didn’t have someone to say let’s fuck off. Let’s get out of here. I tried.” As the ceremony started, Gina and Stephen stood in the back of the room, out of the way. There were maybe twenty people there in all. Amber and Johnny stood in front of the fireplace facing each other. Betty Sue was seated on one of the couches. All the other guests stood in the back. Johnny was wearing a short- sleeved black shirt, black vest, and black trousers. Amber wore a slinky white silk slip dress with a short lace veil over the back of her head. Jack stood to the couple’s right in a gray T-shirt holding the large black ring box. Patti Smith said a few simple words about love and the importance of communication. Then the hired officiant, a Russian woman named Maria Kharlash, owner of “Instant Marriage LA,” a one-stop-shop for marriage licenses and officiating, positioned herself to the right of Betty Sue and began to read the wedding vows in her thick accent. She turned to Amber and asked her to repeat the vows. As Amber solemnly repeated the vows, looking into Johnny’s eyes, his mother muttered something unforgettable. “She don’t love him,” Betty Sue said venomously, loud enough for everyone in the small room, including Amber, to hear. The officiant carried on. “Do you take Amber as your lawful wedded wife?” “Yeah,” Johnny drawled, casual as ever, as if she’d asked him to borrow a twenty. The officiant, her voice lilting, said, “You do?” “Yes, I do,” he responded, smiling, and swinging his head back toward the officiant. She asked Amber the same question. “I do,” Amber said softly. “She knows her lines,” Johnny joked. Jack handed his father the ring, which Johnny placed on Amber’s finger. The room looked on as Johnny and Amber sealed their vows with a kiss. Johnny’s forty-five-acre island looked like a Corona commercial, covered in brilliant green flora, with bleached white sand beaches and crystal-blue waters. Johnny bought the island in 2004 for $3.6 million with zero existing infrastructure. He’d named the various beaches on the island after those he loved: Lily-Rose Beach, Jack Beach, Gonzo Beach (for Hunter S. Thompson), Brando Beach (for Marlon), Heath’s Place (for Heath Ledger), and Amber’s Cove (formerly known as Vanessa’s Beach). Johnny built a modest round bungalow with a thatched roof. The home was scattered with small trinkets and books and art, and the windows were covered in makeshift curtains made of scarves. As the guests arrived, the island was aflutter with activity ahead of Johnny and Amber’s second wedding ceremony. Chef Russell Borrill, Johnny’s freelance personal chef, had arrived by seaplane two days before the wedding guests and knew he had to get to work right away if he was going to pull off this job. Only a few days earlier, he’d gotten a call from Stephen asking if he could do a rush job catering Johnny and Amber’s wedding: breakfast, lunch, and dinner over several days for up to forty people on a remote private island. All the food would have to be flown in. It was a Herculean task, but Russell loved Johnny as a boss and as a friend, so he’d do whatever he needed to get the job done. He scrambled for a crew, but only his chef friend Robbie was around to help. Russell met Johnny in 2011 on the set of the Warner Bros. film Dark Shadows. He had previously been working for Martin Scorsese, and someone recommended him to Stephen Deuters and Nathan Holmes because Johnny needed to diet to become a “skinny vampire” for the film. “At first he was very quiet and timid around me. I remember one day I knew Lily-Rose [twelve at the time] was coming to set so I got this machine to make pizza dough because I knew she liked pizza. And he asked me, what’s that for? And I said, ‘I’m making pizza for Lily-Rose.’ From then on he was just sweet to me, and once he got comfortable around me he was just a good friend.” According to Russell, at first Johnny and Amber behaved the way you would imagine a couple newly in love would. They’d leave “lovey-dovey” Post-it notes for each other around the London house, a rental they lived in while Johnny was in production on Alice Through the Looking Glass in 2014. Russell lived in the same house, his room separated from theirs by only a small corridor. The house was large, with a courtyard and a wooden gate out front, and a comfortable kitchen for Russell to work in. Amber’s friends were often around, and Russell cooked for them, preparing large spreads of different themed foods: Portuguese, French, English. When it was just Johnny and Amber, Russell would prepare buffet-style dinners for them that they’d enjoy together in front of the TV while watching documentaries. But by the time of the wedding, Russell said he’d come to some realizations about Amber. “Anything with Amber, I mean—it’s either an amazing kind of time, where everyone’s really happy, or they’re just at each other’s throats. That’s just how it was, whether it was with her parents, whether it was with friends, or whether it was with Johnny—that always seemed to be what it was. There never seemed to be any calm. When she was being nice to Johnny it was very intense. And when she was horrible to him it was very aggressive.” The prep days before the wedding were chaotic. Russell was emailing with Stephen and the staff on the island trying to gather intel on guests and timing of festivities, but everyone seemed to be as confused as he was. This wasn’t how Johnny’s close team of personal assistants normally operated. Russell messaged Nathan Holmes to find out what was going on. “Nathan had no idea that the wedding was even happening.” At the time, Nathan was in Coomera, Australia, setting up the house where Johnny would stay during the filming of the next Pirates movie following the wedding. When Russell landed on the island, Amber and some of her guests were already there. According to Stephen, 90 percent of the guests were Amber’s friends and family. He’d asked Johnny if he wanted to invite Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter, or any other close friends aside from Bruce Witkin, but Johnny appeared embarrassed and told him he didn’t want to invite anyone. “It was very clear whose party it was, it didn’t feel like a mutual enterprise in any way,” Stephen said. The island staff was busy setting up lounging areas around the beaches, consisting of Moroccan rugs thrown on the sand with colorful oversized pillows and poufs, as well as white yurts farther inland for the wedding guests to sleep in. Chef Russell and his assistant were dismayed to realize there were more logistical challenges facing them. The kitchen was a fifteen-minute golf cart ride from the main dining area and bar, down by the beach. They’d have to transport all the food in chafing dishes, round after round. “It was just absolute chaos, to be honest,” Russell said. “I don’t work that way. But they just wanted me to do my best, I suppose.” Russell had to work with the supplies that he could get to the island last minute. Tara Roberts, the island manager, ended up ordering double of everything because she said Amber wasn’t communicating with her. “I tried to do the fig and prosciutto thing that Amber liked, but we couldn’t get fresh figs on the island, so we used dried, and it ended up being a completely different thing. I did a miso cod dish Johnny likes, filet of beef for a fancy dinner. Each day had a theme; we did a BBQ day with pulled pork and ribs, a Spanish day, Caribbean.” Russell recalled a particularly stressful moment one day in between the lunch and dinner service when Amber and her friends decided they wanted fish tacos. Robbie and Russell quickly defrosted fish, found some avocados in the fridge, and tried to turn out a platter of tacos all while prepping and cooking dinner for the dozens of guests. Russell described the mood of the wedding as tense. And drug-fueled. “I was offered MDMA on the beach by one of Amber’s bridesmaids,” he recalled. That night, Johnny pulled Russell aside to give him a hug, thanking him. “He told Christi to look after me, and by that he meant give me the really nice wine. That was the Château Pichon, and I heard it was because Amber and her friends were going through it like nobody’s business. There were people walking around with the bottle in their hands, drinking out of the bottle,” Russell recalled. A single bottle costs nearly $500. “When you get a Pichon ’88, you want to decant it and aerate it. Guzzling it down your throat doesn’t really do it justice.” Russell was dismayed by the wastefulness. “Food would be sitting in chafing dishes for hours. People were hungover, people were doing drugs. Some meals were a waste, because no one would actually turn up.” They embraced and smiled for the clicking cameras. “They looked high as kites,” Bruce Witkin recalled. Of the thirty-odd guests, Bruce and his wife clocked several members of Johnny’s concierge medical staff. Dr. Kipper and his wife were guests, as well as Nurse Debbie Lloyd and Amber’s newly assigned personal nurse, Erin Falati. “Johnny looked sedated. Amber too,” Bruce said. “They looked like fuckin’ zombies. If you need that much medication to get along with the person you love, there’s something fucking wrong.” Suddenly, everyone looked up. There was a helicopter pulsing above. Amber and Johnny stuck their middle fingers indignantly to the sky. The bridal party followed suit, giving the bird and laughing. Later, the zoomed-out helicopter photos of the island ceremony appeared in several tabloids. Johnny’s friends assumed they were tipped off by Amber and her friends. Their theory was that the ceremony, which Amber had inexplicably moved from the evening to earlier in the day, was intentionally rescheduled to get ahead of the designated no-fly-zone window in order to accommodate the cameras. “They were bringing so much stuff from the mainland, someone could’ve figured out a wedding was happening,” Bruce Witkin recalled. “But I wouldn’t put it past her.” After the ceremony, people gathered up the shore for cocktails while DJ Kelly Cole spun music. Guests looked on as Amber threw her bouquet of white roses and eucalyptus into the evening air. It hit the sand without anyone catching it. The wedding reception was held in Amber’s very own Cafe Cabrones, the wooden cantina Johnny had built for Amber as a gift, a replica of the bar from the set of The Rum Diary. It was dive-bar chic, filled with beachy knickknacks, lit by neon bar signs and a Schmidt Beer stained-glass lamp. Amber and Johnny danced their first dance to “When I Get My Hands on You,” a ballad written by Bob Dylan and performed by the New Basement Tapes. They held each other closely and looked into each other’s eyes, lit by the videographer’s bright white box light and the sporadic flashes of cameras, the slow song punctuated by animated and elongated “whoops” and “yeahs” from guests looking on. At the end of the dance, Amber held her fist up to Johnny’s face and pretended to punch at him, smiling. Once seated, the toasts began. Bruce Witkin and his wife, Suzanne, remembered an emotional toast from Whitney, in which she was “basically just crying.” Johnny’s dad stood for a toast in a tan jacket and bolo tie; he looked down at Johnny and joked in a thick country accent, “Well, I’ve known this young fella for quite a few years.” The most memorable toast of the night came from David Heard, who gestured to the island around him, proclaiming it was all Amber’s now, before saying the same of Johnny’s numerous properties in LA. They were all hers now too. The toasts drew to a close and the music was turned up for dancing. Amber changed into a silver lamé slip dress and donned a crown made of flowers. She held hands and swung Jack around the dance floor. He smiled awkwardly while wearing a black Spitfire Wheels hoodie. Lily-Rose didn’t make it to the wedding. Betty Sue, who was being treated for aggressive cancer in Los Angeles, couldn’t come either. Johnny danced with Amber’s mom, Paige, who looked frail but happy, to “I’m on Fire” by Bruce Springsteen. Amber appeared effusive and joyful; Johnny detached and withdrawn. Later that night, sitting next to Gina Deuters at the reception inside the cantina, Amber leaned in and asked her, “Do you and Stephen ever fight?” Slightly weirded out by the question being posed on Amber’s wedding night, Gina replied, “I mean, no, not really,” Amber grabbed Gina’s arm in emphasis. “No. No. Gina. I mean, like . . . really fight?” Excerpted from the book HOLLYWOOD VAMPIRES by Kelly Loudenberg and Makiko Wholey. Copyright © 2025 by Kelly Loudenberg and Makiko Wholey. From Dey Street, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted with permission.