When you’re a celebrity, channeling current events, topical news, or headline-grabbing tabloid fodder as inspiration can often end up backfiring, something Schitt’s Creek star Emily Hampshire has discovered firsthand after she and a friend dressed up as Johnny Depp and Amber Heard for Halloween.
As tends to be the case whenever the warring ex-spouses are involved, the battle lines were immediately drawn when the actress shared images on her social media accounts, but the backlash quickly became so swift, severe, and all-encompassing that she ended up deleting the snaps from Instagram entirely before replacing them with an apology.
“I want to address what is one of the most thoughtless, insensitive, and ignorant things I’ve ever done. For Halloween, I stupidly thought it would be funny to dress as Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. I am deeply sorry and ashamed for putting something that awful out in the universe. Domestic abuse is never, ever funny. These are real issues with real people and I REALLY regret my actions. In the future I will do better. I’m so sorry.”
You’d think it might have crossed Hampshire’s mind at least once that no small amount of her 800,000+ followers might have something to say about her deciding that one of the highest-profile Hollywood courtroom battles of the modern era that dominated the discourse for a variety of reasons – many of them unsavory – could have been interpreted in a negative manner, but that’s not for us to say.
Either way, the apology has been issued, even if the images hardly remain difficult to find.