Soon we will have more wacky madness from Johnny Depp on the big screen when The Lone Ranger rides onto the big screen on July 3. And although Depp didn’t conceive of the Lone Ranger concept, he certainly put his stamp on the character early on.
“I was doing The Rum Diary with Bruce (Robinson) in Puerto Rico, and I had already found a painting of a Native American warrior with these stripes down his face. I asked my makeup artist, Joel Harlow, who is a wizard, to help me put something together. So we did the makeup and I asked the photographer, Peter Mountain, to take some shots. We went out into these filthy weeds and started taking some photographs and Peter printed them out and showed me and I was like, ‘Yeah, I think we’ve found him and now he needs to be brought to life.’ I called up Jerry and said, ‘Look, when I’m back in LA, I’d love to sit down with you.’
“And so we met up and I handed him five or six photographs and Jerry said, ‘He’s fantastic. Who is that?’ And I said, ‘It’s me!’ And Jerry said, ‘Jesus! Can I take these with me?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, sure, show them to the boys.’ And I also showed them to Dick Cook [former chairman of Walt Disney Studios] and the responses were all very positive because for them, I think there was some element of Captain Jack Sparrow, a Captain Jack–type character. And everybody got excited about it, including me, and then I went after Gore (Verbinski) to direct it,” Depp remembered.
The character in the film has a “dead bird” on his head derived from the same painting Depp originally saw of the Native American that inspired his depiction of the character. “At first glance I thought the crow was on his head (in the painting). It wasn’t but I decided that the best thing to do was to take a dead bird and put it on top of my head as my spirit guide. Everyone should try it by the way—it really is something (laughs). But that was it—the bird became his spirit guide.”
Depp spent hours in the makeup chair every day during this production – so much so he decided to prepare before he reached the set by wearing it at home to save more time in the morning. “It wasn’t comfortable, and it looked funny but it was worth it, I think,” Johnny laughed.
The Lone Ranger was a very popular television series in its day. Depp even remembers watching it when he was a youngster. “I remember seeing The Lone Ranger —it was one of those regular things that you would see on television as a kid. I watched it and I always identified with Tonto. And even as a kid I wondered why the Indian was the sidekick. And it wasn’t that the Lone Ranger was overtly disrespectful in the way he treated Tonto but I just thought, ‘Why is he the guy that has to go and do this and that? Why isn’t he the hero?’
“So, that was something that was always on my mind. And I was told at a very young age that we have some Indian blood in our family … who knows how much—maybe very little, I don’t know, although my great grandmother on my mother’s side had quite the look with the braids and everything. She was a wonderful, beautiful woman (Mae Sloan) and she lived until she was 102 and chewed tobacco until the day she died. She was an amazing woman.”
Depp’s portrayal of Tonto in The Lone Ranger is very different from those seen in previous versions, but it is very relevant to today. “I think he is relevant because, for me, however long cinema has been around the Native American has been treated very poorly by Hollywood for the most part. And what I wanted to do was play this character not as the sidekick to the Lone Ranger. I wanted to play him as a warrior and as a man with great integrity and dignity. It’s my small sliver of a contribution to try and right the wrongs that have been committed in the past.”
While filming, Depp got along just as well off-screen as he did on-screen with his ranger pal, Armie Hammer. “Armie’s fantastic. First and foremost, Armie is a great guy; he’s very smart, very quick and clever with a great wit and he’s super talented. He committed to playing the Lone Ranger as an earnest, naïve, ‘white man’—and that’s exactly right. Armie is a young actor coming up the ranks and he looks like a classic movie star and what’s more, he has the chops to back it up. So he fully committed to this role—he played it perfectly, he got the humor, and he didn’t want to play it as the ‘cool guy’ as it were. I found him a dream to work with and I feel like I’ve made a really good friend in Armie.”
Johnny might have made good with Armie, but he did not fare as well with his horse-mate. There was a bit of animalistic tension during filming. “The horse had it in for me (laughs). We’d been running the horses pretty hot that day and went down a couple of paths and that all worked out fine, and we changed paths in order to get closer to the camera car and the horses were still running real hot — they wanted to run. And Scout decided to jump over a couple of obstacles, and yeah, user error, I don’t know what happened, but it happened very fast and very slow.
“The weird thing was, it wasn’t like you would expect—you’d expect to be riddled with fear or adrenaline but it all just sort of happened and I saw everything very clearly, which was the horse’s very muscular front legs moving at a very dangerous speed and I was still holding on to the mane like an idiot trying to get back up and at a certain point you have to make a decision, do I go down and hit the deck on my own? Or do I wait for the hoof to split my face in two? So I decided to go down on my own and then, incredibly, the horse lifted its front legs and he missed me and he could have crushed me in seconds. I was very lucky that the horse’s instincts were very good,” explains Depp.
Horsey hostilities aside, Johnny experienced a great honor as a result of his involvement in this production – adoption from the Comanche nation. “It was such a great honor that was bestowed upon me. It’s incredible. I couldn’t ever have dreamed anything like that would ever happen, and they have been so great, and now I have a new family. This woman, Ladonna (Harris) is my peer, as they say in Comanche. She’s my peer and my Mom and she calls me ‘son’. And when they welcome you in, they really welcome you in, and that was a high point for me.”
Depp continued, “I still can’t believe that they chose me. The production was blessed by the Navajo and the Comanche, and we were treated so incredibly [well] by these wonderful, generous people, and we all ended up having great relationships with these people. LaDonna decided she wanted to adopt me into her family and into the Comanche nation and that will probably be the greatest honor I’ve ever been given.”
The Lone Ranger rides into theaters July 3, 2013. It’s based on a Native American warrior Tonto (Johnny Depp), who recounts the untold tales that transformed John Reid (Armie Hammer), a man of the law, into a legend of justice—taking the audience on a runaway train of epic surprises and humorous friction as the two unlikely heroes must learn to work together and fight against greed and corruption.
I write like I think—fast, curious, and a little feral. I chase the weird, the witty, and the why-is-this-happening-now. From AI meltdowns to fashion glow-ups, if it makes you raise an eyebrow or rethink your algorithm, I’m probably writing about it. Expect sharp takes, occasional sarcasm, and zero tolerance for boring content.
