Amber Heard talks about balancing between superhero movies and indie films

Some actors dive headfirst into the big budget tentpole film pool and have fun popping up in superhero movies or Star Wars movies and not doing much else, but not everyone can do that—and not everyone wants to. Take Amber Heard, who recently told Deadline that her definition of “success” as an actor is being able to careful balance the pressure of a big superhero movie and the more personal opportunities of smaller “passion projects.”

It’s a nuanced take on the whole comic book movie thing from an acting perspective, hitting a nice midpoint between “I think they’re boring so I hate doing them” and people like the Avengers actors who have no choice but to make it their whole personality. This came up because Heard was speaking with Deadline to promote her new indie drama In The Fire (in which she plays a psychiatrist in the 1890s trying to prove that a troubled youth isn’t actually possessed by evil), with Heard saying that the movie is a “work of art and work of love” that has “nowhere near the same resources” as something like Aquaman or its upcoming sequel The Lost Kingdom.

She says making movies like Aquaman (which she’s “very honored” to be part of) require “compromises,” because there’s “a ton of pressure” and a ton of money involved in trying to make a project like that be “the most successful thing it can be,” and while smaller movies don’t have that external pressure, meaning there’s more room to “breathe life into the story,” they also don’t have the resources. She figures there’s “something cool about that,” and being able to walk in both of those worlds—which she calls “two very different ends of the spectrum”—is “success” to an actor.