Johnny Depp Rejected an Early Draft of the Upcoming ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ Sequel Because it Had a Female Villain

The film now stars Javier Bardem and Geoffrey Rush as the antagonists.

By Yoselin Acevedo

Yoselin Acevedo

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Johnny Depp returns this month as Captain Jack Sparrow in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales.” Spanish actor Javier Bardem joins the fifth installment of the popular franchise as the villainous Captain Salazar, alongside Geoffrey Rush’s devious Captain Barbossa. But, according to scribe Terry Rossio, an earlier version of the script featured a female villain.

In a recent blog post, where he discusses the hurdles of script writing and movie production, Rossio revealed that Depp rejected that version because it had a female villain. “My version of ‘Dead Men Tell No Tales’ was set aside because it featured a female villain, and Johnny Depp was worried that would be redundant to ‘Dark Shadows,’ which also featured a female villain,” Rossie wrote, adding that “there is also the possibility that [the screenplay] simply sucked.”

The writer explained that some of his scripts had been “put on the back burner,” during the production process. “But usually, when I go back to read a screenplay that wasn’t produced, it holds up, often better than the film that was eventually produced. Sometimes it just takes a single decision by a single person, often just a whim, to destroy years of story creation and world-building. Non-production has a thousand fathers, production only one.”

“Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales,” co-directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, opens in theaters May 26. You can watch the latest trailer below.