Heard/Depp Trial

[Chase]

Could Johnny Depp really be considered Charismatic?
He has a very slow and drunken way of speaking and it's like he is thinking before every word he says

Are there elements in him that can be incorporated to make one seem more charismatic?

He's not very charismatic in these courtroom appearances.

But he's not playing a character here. He's going for "normal, trustworthy, straight shooter, credible." Not "zany, attractive, absorbing, engaging."

Charisma is a bit of an on/off switch. You can absolutely turn it off.

Compare Johnny in his Pirates appearances with him on the stand. It's like two different people.

Or compare him between different movies he's done. In The Ninth Gate (one of my favorite films) he's a lot less charismatic and a lot more ordinary than he is in Pirates.

Remember that charisma is part performance/signals, part environmental. In Pirates he's a notorious pirate in command of a ship off in search of a treasure / redemption. The whole mission and environment is romantic; he's in command of a large crew of shipmates, giving him status; and so on.

On the stand, he's just a well-known, well-liked actor with a wrecked career, being shown as a sloppy drunk in videos, obviously having gained a bunch of weight, talking about being abused physically and verbally by a smaller, younger woman.

Performance + considerations of the social environment.

They work perfectly for Johnny in Pirates. Worked a lot less well for him on the stand -- but "be sparklingly magnetic" is not what you are aiming for when on the stand in a make-or-break court case though, either.

Chase

 

[James D]

Compare Johnny in his Pirates appearances with him on the stand. It's like two different people.

Or compare him between different movies he's done. In The Ninth Gate (one of my favorite films) he's a lot less charismatic and a lot more ordinary than he is in Pirates.

Remember that charisma is part performance/signals, part environmental. In Pirates he's a notorious pirate in command of a ship off in search of a treasure / redemption. The whole mission and environment is romantic; he's in command of a large crew of shipmates, giving him status; and so on.

On the stand, he's just a well-known, well-liked actor with a wrecked career, being shown as a sloppy drunk in videos, obviously having gained a bunch of weight, talking about being abused physically and verbally by a smaller, younger woman.

Performance + considerations of the social environment.

They work perfectly for Johnny in Pirates. Worked a lot less well for him on the stand -- but "be sparklingly magnetic" is not what you are aiming for when on the stand in a make-or-break court case though, either.

Chase

One intereting observation is that in Pirates of the Carribean Dead Men Tell No Tales, the final Pirates movie, Depp has lost much of his charisma.

I went through all of them to try to decipher what happened. His non-verbal signals were off. He lacked a clear motive in the last movie, which he always had in the previous ones. And he wasn't shown doing anything to demonstrate his skill and intelligence. Just think of the many well engineered dramatic escapes Jack Sparrow does in the first 4 movies, as well as reversing the situation at the end, besting the villains and saving the day.

He does none of that in the final movie. He shows no expertise, he has no drive and ambition, and his personal power seems off.

I guess bad writers + Depp being at the peak of Heard's abuse (right around the time she chopped off his finger) produced a disastrous result.