LONDON — Johnny Depp said Thursday that his relationship with Amber Heard was “a crime scene waiting to happen,” but denied assaulting her during a drug-fueled rampage in Australia while he was filming a “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie.

The Hollywood star was giving evidence for a third day in his libel suit against a U.K. tabloid newspaper that called him a “wife-beater.”

Depp is suing News Group Newspapers, publisher of The Sun, and the paper’s executive editor, Dan Wootton, over an April 2018 article that said he’d physically abused Heard.

The Sun’s defense relies on a total of 14 allegations by Heard of Depp’s violence between 2013 and 2016. He strongly denies all of them.

Under cross-examination by The Sun’s lawyer, Sasha Wass, Depp depicted a volatile relationship with Heard during a period when he was trying to kick drugs and alcohol, and sometimes lapsing. He said he came to feel he was in a “constant tailspin” and recalled telling Heard several times: “Listen, we are a crime scene waiting to happen.” But he denied being violent.

Depp rejected Heard’s claim that he subjected her to a “three-day ordeal of assaults” in March 2015 in Australia, where Depp was appearing as Capt. Jack Sparrow in the fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” film.

“I vehemently deny it and will go as far as to say it’s pedestrian fiction,” he said.

Depp and Wass sparred over disputed details of the Australia episode, which ended up with the couple’s rented house being trashed and Depp’s fingertip being severed to the bone.

Depp accuses Heard of cutting off his fingertip by throwing a vodka bottle at him. She denies being in the room when the digit was severed.

According to Heard, Depp snorted cocaine, swigged Jack Daniels from the bottle, broke bottles, screamed at Heard, smashed her head against a refrigerator, threw her against a pingpong table and broke a window.

“These are fabrications,” he said.

He denied taking drugs but agreed that the couple had argued and he “decided to break my sobriety because I didn’t care anymore. I needed to numb myself.”