VisionQuest made Paul Bettany a Marvel lead, and brought his Johnny Depp texts back with it
Paul Bettany has found the perfect reply to the VisionQuest boycott. It just answers something nobody said.
Paul Bettany has spent the launch week of his own Marvel series answering a question about Johnny Depp. VisionQuest, the first Marvel series with Bettany's Vision as its lead, arrived on Disney+ on 14 October 2026, and almost immediately social media posts started urging viewers to skip it. This week The Independent ran his answer as a headline: "I haven't spoken to him since."
Since 2020, that is, when Depp sued The Sun's publisher for libel in London and a decade of his private messages went into evidence. Among them was a 2013 exchange with Bettany, his co-star in The Tourist, Transcendence and Mortdecai. Depp wrote "Let's burn Amber!!!" and Bettany came back with a joke about holding a "drowning test" first. It got worse from there. Depp lost the case in November 2020, the texts were read aloud again at his 2022 trial against Amber Heard in Virginia, and Depp told that court the witch business was borrowed from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
What Bettany has actually said
Bettany has been asked about the messages several times since, and his answers follow a pattern. They cover the leak, the lawyers and Depp. They almost never cover what Bettany typed.
- December 2021, The Independent: talking about it would only "pour fuel on the fire", and having lawyers comb through ten years of his texts was "an unpleasant feeling".
- February 2022, The Times: the exposure was "embarrassing", the public lacked context, and he "didn't know Johnny when he was married to Amber".
- October 2026: the two of them haven't spoken since.
That is a privacy complaint, an alibi for the marriage years and a friendship that ended. Fair enough on all three. None of them mentions the drowning test.
The boycott is about his half of the chat
The calls to skip the series are not a studio-sized crisis. Reviews were largely positive, there has been no word from Disney, and the campaign mostly lives in comment sections. Its loudest corner is an r/Fauxmoi thread that reposted the 2013 exchange on 14 October, and its top comments aren't asking whether he and Depp are still mates.
"Bettany is a fucking creep and the more people who know, the better. How cool that he keeps getting those huge marvel pay checks."
— top comment on r/Fauxmoi, 1,889 upvotes
Another commenter says they have lost count of the "clueless people" they've told about the texts while explaining why they won't watch VisionQuest. That's how this boycott travels: one dinner-party explanation at a time.
Nobody is boycotting VisionQuest over who Paul Bettany goes for a pint with.
"I haven't spoken to him since" doesn't answer any of those conversations. None of them was about Depp to begin with.
Disney has been here before
In July 2018 Disney fired James Gunn from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 over jokes he had tweeted years earlier, with studio chairman Alan Horn calling them "indefensible and inconsistent with our studio's values". Gunn apologised, the cast campaigned for him, and Disney rehired him on 15 March 2019. Old words cost him eight months and a very public apology.
Bettany's old words were a court exhibit, and Disney has built an eight-episode series around him. The man who wrote "Let's burn Amber" has had to explain his half of that chat in two courtrooms. Bettany's half has so far been filed under "embarrassing".
Episodes 3 and 4 land on 21 October, the finale on 11 November. The question will come up again. "We don't speak" was never going to cover it: the question was never about Depp's half of the chat.
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