Amber Heard has made an appearance - albeit brief - in the first trailer for Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom.
The 37-year-old actress is confirmed to be reprising her role as Mera in the forthcoming DC movie after her character made a fleeting appearance in the first trailer alongside Jason Momoa.
The movie - which follows on from the original film centered around Arthur Curry AKA Aquaman (played by Jason Momoa) and Mera - will focus more on the relationship between the titular character and his brother Orm (Patrick Wilson), leaving Heard with a smaller role.
In the new trailer for the sequel - which will be released on December 20 - Mera is seen for just a split second thumping on a glass window underwater.
Watch the Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom trailer below (and see if you can spot Heard):After the trailer debuted on YouTube, it wasn't long before people in the comments section highlighted the elephant in the room.
"They really put Amber in this trailer as little as possible," one person commented, with a second adding: "Damn they really cut [Amber Heard] almost completely out of this. I wonder if she's still in the movie that much at all."
During the highly publicized defamation trial, the actress alleged she had to "fight really hard" to keep her role, due to the negative publicity from Johnny Depp's abuse allegations against her.
Heard revealed to the Fairfax courtroom that she received a new version of the movie sequel’s script that withdrew a fight scene involving her - resulting in a "very pared-down version" of her part. "I fought really hard to stay in the movie. They didn’t want to include me in the film," she said at the time, per CNN.
However, Aquaman director James Wan confronted the Danish Girl actress' claim that her part as Mera in the sequel was "pared down" due to her tumultuous trial against her 60-year-old former husband.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Wan denied that Heard’s trial had played a part in the creative decision-making, stating: "I always pitched this to everyone from the get-go. The first Aquaman was Arthur and Mera’s journey."
"The second movie was always going to be Arthur and Orm," the filmmaker said, referring to the name of Momoa's character and Patrick Wilson’s supervillain. "So, the first was a romance action-adventure movie, the second one is a bromance action-adventure movie. We’ll leave it at that," he added.
The Pirates of the Caribbean actor ultimately won his defamation case against Heard. The jury ruled that her 2018 Washington Post article titled "I spoke up against sexual violence - and faced our culture’s wrath. That has to change" was defamatory.
She was ordered to pay $10m in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages. The latter sum was reduced to $350,000 to comply with a state statutory cap.
Amid the trial, a petition to remove The Rum Diary star from the Aquaman sequel entirely gained more than 4.5 million signatures. In addition to this, only one of Heard’s co-stars from the franchise has since spoken publicly about working with her on the films.
In June 2022, Dolph Lundgren said: "She was great. I worked with her on the first Aquaman, now the second one. We shot last fall in London. She’s terrific, I had a great experience with her," per The Independent.
"She’s very kind, nice to the crew, nice to everybody, just down to earth," he added.
