A few years ago Johnny Depp decided that it was time to kick-start a project that had been on his mind for a while.
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who made the hugely successful Pirates of the Caribbean, had been intrigued with the idea of making a contemporary, big screen version of The Lone Ranger, the classic 1950s TV series about the masked cowboy crime fighter and his partner, Tonto. But the project was still languishing in development — until Depp, in his own inimitable way, stepped in.
The actor, who plays Tonto in the film, based his look on a painting he’d seen of a Native American warrior and added his own imagination to it. Excerpts from an interview:
Q: Did you watch The Lone Ranger 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. But my great grandmother on my mother’s side had quite the look with the braids. She was a wonderful, beautiful woman, who lived to be 102. Her name was Mae Sloan.
Q: Was she the one who told you about your heritage?
Yeah. We had heard about it as kids so then I guess from that I wanted to learn about more Native Americans and also wanted to find out as much as I could about our heritage and our ancestry. You watch cowboy movies and the Indians were always portrayed as these savages which didn’t sit right with me. So when I played Cowboys and Indians as a five or six-year-old boy, I wanted to be the Indian. And the only way I could it do it, for myself and for the Native Americans, was to play Tonto with great dignity and integrity and at the same time a sense of humour about the white man and all the things that they do. This is my little salute to them.
Q: How long did it take in makeup?
I was in makeup a couple of hours a day. Sometimes I decided to wear it at home to save time in the morning (laughs). It wasn’t comfortable and it looked funny but it was worth it, I think.
Q: You had spoken about how Jack Sparrow came fully formed to you. It sounds like it was the same with Tonto?
He was pretty close to fully formed. And once you start messing around with ideas, making drawings and things of that nature, ideas come to you as they do when you’re on the sets. But yes, he was pretty much there.
Q: In one sense, The Lone Ranger is a buddy movie and it’s essential that you and Armie Hammer clicked on screen. How did that work out?
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. 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. I found him a dream to work with and I feel like I’ve made a really good friend in Armie.
Q: Let’s talk about the future a little. You’re playing Tonto and you’re going back to playing Jack Sparrow. Is there a character out there that you would love to play?
There are things that I would love to experience in terms of playing characters but I’ve kind of done the ones that I wanted to do — nothing is really out there screaming at me.
Q: And you’ve been making a documentary on Keith Richards. When might we see that?
Oh man, it’s going to be so much work. We have so much footage, I have probably in the neighbourhood of 60 hours of footage. It’s fascinating but we’ve got some work to do before it’s ready to go out there.
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