A lot of your relationship with Ruth is sort of the heart of your character, and yet so much of it is offscreen. Did you talk to her in depth at all about your history together as characters, or was it sort of implied? How did you work on that?
So much of it was just presented in the script. Like I said, Justin had done such a great job writing this movie. He was able to balance out the big moments, the small moments, the funny moments, the serious moments. So, the entire way that the romance played, it just seemed to work. Yeah, maybe Ruth and I had 5 or 6 scenes together, total.
If that.
If that, but you feel the effect of it through the course of the entire movie because of how well it was written.
Tom Wilkinson.
Yeah. He’s the man.
You know, you’ve got a bunch of good heavies in this. You’ve got him, you’ve got William Fichtner, you’ve got Barry Pepper, who you don’t really have much time with.
Didn’t have much with Barry. Barry and I did a lot of fly fishing together, though.
Did you really? Had you gone fly fishing before?
Mm-Hm.
Did you introduce it to him?
No, he is quite the accomplished fly fisherman.
Really…?
I was just taggin’ along, yeah.
That is fascinating. Did he just say, “Hey, you wanna go fly fishing?”
Well, we were shooting up in Creede, Colorado. We were shooting nights, so we’d wake up around 2 or 3 in the afternoon, go fly fishing for a little bit, cook whatever we caught and then go to work.
Did you have that kind of free time on this movie? I mean, it’s a huge film but you’re in almost every scene.
Yeah. Not really, no. I mean, I was involved but I didn’t want any free time. If we were out, somewhere like this, I’d rather be working, out somewhere beautiful on the movie rather than sittin’ in my hotel room. Something like that, you know?
So, there’s not a lot of great stories like, “Yeah, we had this crazy party at Ruth Wilson’s place.”
Oh, there are tons of crazy stories. There’s ten months worth of crazy stories.
Gonna give me “a” crazy story?
Nope.
They will all get you in trouble.
They will all get me in trouble.
Every single one.
Yep.
I love knowing that. There’s something really beautiful about that.
Oh, man. Dude, I have such good stories. I wish I could share.
Obviously, you wanna go franchise with this. That’s the goal, I would imagine, right?
Maybe they do. It would all depend on how well this first one does.
That would be the dream. Is there anywhere you would want to go with the character?
Well, I feel like we got a good idea of the genesis of the character. This is the creation myth of the Lone Ranger. He had to start John Reid and become Lone Ranger, so now if you start here at Lone Ranger, who knows where you can go? You’re kind of open, which is kind of a good thing, I guess.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
