Johnny Depp is as excited as anyone about his longtime pal Robert Downey Jr.’s Oscar win for Oppenheimer — but in celebrating the occasion, the actor’s photo selection wasn’t quite savvy.
The Mortdecai star uploaded a throwback photo of himself and the Iron Man actor to his Instagram story to commemorate the victory. The only problem: the pic was actually a photoshopped version of a snap of Downey with then-girlfriend Sarah Jessica Parker, and Depp wasn’t originally in the photo at all.
Depp (or, more likely, his social media team who were probably responsible for the gaff in the first place) realized the mistake and replaced the post with a more recent (and real) photo of the two actors together. “Let’s try this again…congrats to my dear friend,” the caption reads.
Johnny Depp/Instagram
A representative for Depp declined to comment on the matter.
The edited photo appears to be from a fan account, and has circulated on fan pages since 2021.
The original image of Downey with Parker — who starred with Depp in Ed Wood — was taken at a Young Artists Unite event in Los Angeles in November 1988. The actors dated for seven years, from 1984 to 1991.
Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
Although the first photo of Depp with Downey was fake, the friendship between the two actors is real. There are numerous photos of the pair together dating back to the 1990s (which makes the flub all the more puzzling), and the Sherlock Holmes actor congratulated the Rum Diary star after the conclusion of his defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard in 2021.
Downey won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer on Sunday night. He’d previously been nominated for Best Actor for Chaplin and Best Supporting Actor for Tropic Thunder. Depp is a three-time Oscar nominee for Best Actor (for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Finding Neverland, and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street), but has never won the award.
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