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Ayo Edebiri recalled receiving the “most insane death threats and racial slurs” after Elon Musk spread misinformation about her supposed role in a “fake reboot” of the Pirates of the Caribbean.
Last February, Musk reshared a post on X that falsely claimed Disney was considering 29-year-old Edebiri as a replacement for Johnny Depp in the franchise’s upcoming Pirates 6 movie.
“Disney sucks,” the X owner and tech billionaire captioned the since-deleted post.
“Just remembering when I got some of the most insane death threats and racial slurs of my life (idk if it’s the #1 moment, but for sure top 3) for a fake reboot of a movie I had never even heard of because of this man,” Edebiri wrote on her Instagram Story on Tuesday.
Sharing a screenshot of Musk’s original tweet, she added: “LMAO. So not only is he double s**g h**l-ing fascist, he’s an idiot but anyway. Life is, of course, a gift.”
The Independent has contacted Musk’s representative for comment.
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Disney announced in late 2019 that it would be moving forward in developing a script for a Pirates of the Caribbean reboot. At the time, it hadn’t formally been announced whether Depp, who led the first five movies, would be attached to the new project.
However, in 2022, during his infamous defamation trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard, Depp testified that her statements in a 2018 Washington Post op-ed — implying he had abused her — had hurt his career. He claimed that he had been dropped from Pirates six days after the op-ed was published.
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Depp ultimately walked away victorious, with the jury ordering Heard to pay him $10 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages. Heard was also awarded $2 million in punitive damages in her countersuit against Depp.
Amid the trial, Pirates producer Jerry Bruckheimer told The Times that, at the moment, Disney had no plans of bringing Depp back as Captain Jack Sparrow. He did, however, add that “the future is yet to be decided.”
Still, there has been no update about whether Disney has changed its stance on Depp’s exclusion from the forthcoming reboot, despite Bruckheimer’s personal preference to bring Depp back.
“It’s a reboot, but if it was up to me, he would be in it,” Bruckheimer told Entertainment Weekly in 2024. “I love him. He’s a good friend. He’s an amazing artist and he’s a unique look. He created Captain Jack. That was not on the page, that was him doing a little Pepé Le Pew and Keith Richards. That was his interpretation of Jack Sparrow.”
