But you can't build a car now like you did in the 50s. They had big fender flares and they were solid and bulky and cumbersome and they were great. The cars built in the 50s were great cars. The analogy I use is, it's like making a car. So he's a 19th century hero created in the mid-20th century. But this isn't your grandad's Lone Ranger, says Hammer. Heroes don't come any more all-American that this. Still, the Lone Ranger is quite a mantle Hammer is assuming. Yes, the movie is an odd-buddy action-comedy from the folks behind Pirates of the Caribbean. As the Lone Ranger - and John Reid, the frontier lawyer he was pre-mask - he's playing the straight man to Johnny Depp's oddball Tonto. Hammer is, like the Winklevi - as Mark Zuckerberg called them - a man of some means, his father Michael having ties to Occidental Petroleum, the oil company founded in the 1920s by Armie's great-grandpa and still pumping strong.īut young Armand, raised in Los Angeles, Dallas and the Cayman Islands, decided to get into acting instead. But he's gone and got himself another famous pop culture hero mask instead. Oh, and he was last in Australia in 2007 preparing to play Bruce Wayne/Batman in a scrapped Justice League movie to be directed by George Miller. Heck, he even played America's most famous evangelist, Billy Graham, in the little-seen Billy: The Early Years. Edgar Hoover's right-hand man Clyde Tolson in Clint Eastwood's biopic of the FBI boss - who was played by Leonardo DiCaprio and a bucket of latex. He's been one in quite a few movies now - he played Wasp wonderboys Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss in The Social Network.

The new Lone Ranger talks to Russell Baillie about riding tall in the saddleĪrmie Hammer, all square-jawed 1.95m of him, sits in a Sydney waterfront hotel lounge, looking very much the all-American guy.

The lone ranger original