And in September, like most of us, Heard watched Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I was in my hotel room in New York, and I was immediately nailed to the floor in a puddle of tears,” she says. “We as women took a collective punch to the gut.” A week later she joined Rise and a group of survivors in D.C. to appeal to Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, the only Republican on the committee who lobbied for an FBI investigation into Ford’s allegations. “It took a moment for him to realize I did not want a selfie with him,” she says. “I thanked him. I told him that in my life I have done the unpopular thing: go up against a powerful system. It takes grace and bravery; it can feel lonely and terrifying.” A week later Sen. Flake voted to confirm Kavanaugh. “He chose not to face it, I guess. And the results are…,” her voice wavers. “I guess you can see the results.”
But Heard doesn’t feel hopeless; she knows that not all fights are won overnight. Not all politicians are heroes or villains. Not all female underwater superheroes are Aquawomen. And she embraces those contradictions. Her stardom may reinforce Hollywood’s status quo: white, blond, gorgeous. But she’s dead set on reframing the story told about her. Heard specifically joined social media at the end of 2016 because she was tired of being the only one “not weighing in on the narrative of my life,” she says.
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She’s also eager to weigh in on the issues she knows, like wage disparity. “We get paid less as women, and we end up spending more time on set, because of hair and makeup demands,” she says. Was she not equitably compensated for Aquaman? “No, no, no,” she insists. “I’m trying to elucidate a bigger point, which is that we’re working in an inherently flawed system.”
Heard is trying to work within that system as best she can; the bonus of starring in a franchise film like Aquaman is what comes after the franchise film. For her this means getting to stretch new muscles as a nineties-era punk rocker in Her Smell, opposite Elisabeth Moss and Cara Delevingne. Her role is small, but she says, “it was incredibly inspiring to work with more than one or two quote-unquote token females.” This year she also became a global ambassador for L’Oréal Paris (“I feel lucky to be aligned with a brand associated with the empowerment of women,” she says).
When I ask her to name someone whose career she admires, she steers the conversation away from actors to people like Palestinian American activist Yasmeen Mjalli, who’s bringing the #MeToo movement to the West Bank, and Stanford University law professor Michele Dauber, who supported “Emily Doe” in the Stanford rape case. “It’s those women who deserve the spotlight,” she says. “I am humbled just to amplify their voices.”
