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Helena Bonham Carter Defends J.K. Rowling, Slams Cancel Culture

   DailyWire.com
Helena Bonham Carter
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English actress Helena Bonham Carter is speaking out against cancel culture, especially as it relates to her frequent co-star Johnny Depp and author J.K. Rowling.

Carter, 56, spoke with The Times about her feelings on Depp and Rowling being vilified by both the public and the media. 

“I hate cancel culture. It has become quite hysterical and there’s a kind of witch-hunt and a lack of understanding,” Carter said.

The actress said Depp was “completely vindicated” following his defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard, which ended with a Virginia jury awarding him $10 million. Carter starred in seven movies with Depp, the godfather of Carter’s children she shared with her ex, filmmaker Tim Burton.

The interviewer asked if the trial was indicative of the “pendulum of #MeToo swinging back,” to which Carter replied that she thinks “(Heard) got on that pendulum. That’s the problem with these things – that people will jump on the bandwagon because it’s the trend and to be the poster girl for it.”

As for Rowling, Carter said the backlash is so extreme partly because the billionaire “Harry Potter” author is so famous. She thinks the ire “wouldn’t be so great” if Rowling wasn’t “the most phenomenal success.”

“I think there’s a lot of envy unfortunately and the need to tear people down that motors a lot of this canceling,” the “Sweeney Todd” star said. “It’s horrendous, a load of bollocks. I think she has been hounded. It’s been taken to the extreme, the judgmentalism of people.”

“She’s allowed her opinion, particularly if she’s suffered abuse,” Carter continued. “Everybody carries their own history of trauma and forms their opinions from that trauma and you have to respect where people come from and their pain. You don’t all have to agree on everything — that would be insane and boring. She’s not meaning it aggressively, she’s just saying something out of her own experience.”

The actress’s statements are the opposite of what most actors from the “Harry Potter” franchise are saying. Many of them came out against Rowling, saying they stand with transgender people and simultaneously disavowed the franchise creator for saying she believes in the biological reality of women.

Most recently, actor Daniel Radcliffe said it was important to weigh in on the transgender argument and take sides against Rowling.

“The reason I was felt very, very much as though I needed to say something when I did was because, particularly since finishing ‘Potter,’ I’ve met so many queer and trans kids and young people who had a huge amount of identification with Potter on that,” the 33-year-old actor told IndieWire.

“And so seeing them hurt on that day I was like, I wanted them to know that not everybody in the franchise felt that way,” Radcliffe said.

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