Is Amber Heard plagiarising The Talented Mr. Ripley during testimony? Fact Check

ByCraig Haley

Rumors proliferating on social media claim that actress Amber Heard – who at the time is at trial for a defamation case brought against her by ex-husband Johnny Depp – is plagiarising popular movies during her testimony, most notably The Talented Mr. Ripley.

MOSTLY FALSE

The defamation case involving Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, who are both accusing each other of being abusive during their relationship, has proven to be an exceptionally contentious subject on social media, and it is these types of viral, celebrity-laden themes that often spark just-as-viral misinformation. One such example seems to be the claim that Amber Heard has consistently ripped off the scripts of several movies during her testimony, with many rumors asserting she has used excerpts from movies almost verbatim. See below.

The claim above – which appears to be the most prolific of these types of claims – states that Heard ripped off a line – word for word – originally spoken by the character Marge Sherwood (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) in the movie The Talented Mr. Ripley.

However, while this really is an excerpt from the movie, there is no record of Amber Heard also using those words in any part of her testimony thus far, and no one making this specific claim has been able to produce a video of her saying it. Something that is especially suspicious since the entire trial has been broadcast publicly. We reviewed existing transcripts and videos of Heard’s testimony and cannot locate her uttering those lines.


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Other commentators have instead claimed that some of Heard’s testimony appears to have been inspired by parts of The Talented Mr. Ripley as opposed to quoted word-for-word, such as below.

This is a far more subjective claim and open to interpretation, so instead we’ll leave the two most closely matching excerpts from Heard and from the film and you can make your own determination.

Heard –

When I was around Johnny I felt like the most beautiful person in the whole world. He made me feel seen. He made me feel like a million dollars. And that kind of… feeling, you know… he just lavish gifts and lavish expressions of love and how he had never met a woman like me…

The Talented Mr. Ripley –

The thing with Dickie… it’s like the sun shines on you, and it’s glorious. And then he forgets you and it’s very, very cold…
When you have his attention, you feel like you’re the only person in the world, that’s why everybody loves him so much.

The most prolific version of this claim, however, is that Heard is using lines from the movie verbatim, and this appears not to be the case, so we rank this claim as mostly false.

Many other iterations of this rumour are also spreading, but those we have seen appear to rely on either subjective analysis (e.g. Amber Heard appears to physically resemble Rosamund Pike’s character from Gone Girl) or using small cherry-picked excerpts from her testimony and comparing them to other lines from the vast annals of movie history (e.g. Amber Heard at one point says “drink lots of tea” and that same line was also said by Julia Roberts in the 1999 movie Notting Hill.)