Trailer
Plot summary
Frank T. Hopkins rides in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show with Hidalgo, a mustang, and is advertised as the greatest endurance horse and rider. He carries guilt for a dispatch he once delivered to the cavalry, the message that authorized the killing at Wounded Knee, and he translates for Chief Eagle Horn, a Lakota performer who asks Bill to help the mustangs the government has rounded up to destroy. Sheikh Riyadh, custodian of the al-Khamsa bloodline, sends his attaché Aziz and Rau Rasmussen to invite Hopkins to the Ocean of Fire, an annual contest of 3,000 miles through the Najd. Only pure-bred Arabians and Bedouin riders have been admitted. His fellow performers raise his fee. He also meets Lady Anne Davenport, an English breeder. The sheikh has promised his daughter Jazira to Prince Bin Al Reeh should the prince win.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Hidalgo (2004)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Johnny Depp testified under oath during his defamation trial against Amber Heard that Disney's Touchstone Pictures had offered him the lead in Hidalgo, but he turned it down after reading the script, and asked Disney for something more family-friendly instead, leading to his casting as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean.
- The Saudi Arabian government said officially that the “Ocean of Fire” race had never occurred, and according to Arab historian Dr. Awad al-Badi such a lengthy race was impossible. Hopkins himself referred to it only as an annual ceremonial ride in the region.
- Two of the American Paint horses that played Hidalgo went on to real retirements: star Viggo Mortensen bought RH Tecontender for himself, and screenwriter John Fusco bought the main stunt horse, Oscar, retiring him at his own American Indian horse conservancy, Red Road Farm.
- Viggo Mortensen, who is fluent in Spanish, personally voiced his own character Frank Hopkins for the film's Latin American Spanish-language dub rather than leaving the role to a separate voice actor.
- Nakota filmmaker Angelique Midthunder defended the film's premise, saying the story of a half-Indian rider crossing the sea with his pinto mustang to race in the desert had been told to children of the northern plains tribes for generations, while Lakota elder Sonny Richards affirmed that Frank Hopkins really was a South Dakota-born Lakota half-breed known as Kaiyuzeya Sunkanyanke.
- Screenwriter John Fusco defended the film's historical liberties by pointing to Frank Hopkins' own unpublished 1891 desert memoirs and testimony from surviving acquaintances, including former distance riders Walt and Edith Pyle and Lt. Col. William Zimmerman, as evidence the underlying story was true even if 'heightened' for drama.
