This probably hurt more than when he saw the box-office returns for “The Tourist.”
Johnny Depp barely escaped serious injury while filming “The Lone Ranger,” when he fell off a galloping horse and was dragged through the desert and nearly trampled. He walked away with just a bad bruise on his stomach. In the shape of a hoof print.
“I would say that the positive thing is my coccyx didn’t take it,” the always-cool actor joked immediately following the accident.
“That was one of the scariest moments ever,” director Gore Verbinski tells The Post. “Simple things in Westerns are incredibly dangerous. I have such respect for the actors and stuntmen and directors. It’s really hard to make these movies because they are very dangerous.”
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Depp has ridden horses in movies before, and the entire principal cast of “The Lone Ranger” got a refresher course in Western techniques at a pre-shoot cowboy boot camp in Albuquerque, NM. There, the actors learned riding, saddling, shooting and roping.
Depp jokingly says that his horse, named Scout, had it in for him on the day of the accident.
“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,” he says. “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.”
Depp, 50, says his near-death experience wasn’t as scary as one might think.
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“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?” the actor says. “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.”
The superstar has reportedly decided to do fewer of his own stunts going forward. Depp isn’t known for doing his own work, like Tom Cruise, but he has tackled some heart-stopping scenes before. In 1995’s “Nick of Time,” he was attached to wires and dropped off a hotel balcony to shoot a falling scene. In “The Lone Ranger,” he was again attached to wires, this time to film a fight scene atop a moving train.
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Depp’s latest injury isn’t his first on a film set. He got beaten up pretty badly on 2011’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.”
“I must have done something to my back during a stunt, and ended up with this bad sciatic situation,” Depp told the Hollywood Reporter. “It was this horrible, grinding electricity going through me. I kept shooting, there was no choice; I’d just limp on set.
“It was monstrous, man — so horrible that I actually started to like it!” Depp continued. “It was bad, and I had it a good three weeks to a month. But I got used to it and kind of missed it when it was gone.”
Here’s hoping his back has finally healed. Depp is scheduled to reprise his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in a fifth installment of the franchise, tentatively set to bow in 2015.
At least pirates don’t have to ride horses.