How path to playing a young Johnny Depp started with a blind date to a Nashville prom

The path to playing a young Johnny Depp began with a cover of a Justin Bieber song.

One basically ignored many times over by a successful music producer in Nashville.

Until one day that music producer needed to find a blind date to the prom for a young girl at Franklin High School.

And that’s how Anthony De La Torre’s career — and his role playing a youthful Depp in the latest "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie — really began.

So let’s back up to 2012.

At the time, De La Torre — now a 23-something with long brown hair, playful eyes, and an uncanny knack for walking and talking like hornswoggling pirate Jack Sparrow — was living in Bowling Green, Ohio. 

He was an aspiring actor and musician whose main gig was working as a Bieber impersonator and trying to break into the entertainment industry.

He made tons and tons of YouTube videos.

His uncle Freddy — who worked with renowned Nashville songwriter and producer Desmond Child on the Broadway musical Cuba Libre — sent the videos to Child.

"Desmond never watched any of them," De La Torre says with a smirk, "because he’s a busy man, and he doesn’t have time for this random 16-year-old boy."

That is, until the day Child got a desperate text from Carolyn Truscott, a friend in Nashville who had a chicken farm where Child’s family got eggs. 

She explained that her daughter Lilly didn't have a date for her high school prom and was locked in her room crying inconsolably. Then she asked if Child knew a young artist who would be willing to take Lilly to the prom. 

That same day, Child got another video from De La Torre’s uncle — a cover of Bieber's song "Boyfriend" — and realized the kid would be perfect.

The blind date that changed everything

So, like Ed McMahon with a million dollar Publisher's Clearing House check, Child called De La Torre and asked the young musician if he wanted to fly to Nashville for the weekend. 

“My heart exploded,” De La Torre says. “I thought, ‘He’s going to want to work with me. We’re going to make an album. I’m going to go platinum. It’s going to be amazing.’”

Definitely.

“He thought it was to … become a superstar,” Child says. 

OK, not exactly. Not yet, anyway.

Two days later, De La Torre donned a rented tux and climbed into a Bentley driven by Child’s butler and headed to a Tennessee farm to pick up a girl he had never met. 

In the car on the way, De La Torre got a text from Child. It said: "You own me forever."

De La Torre would make good on that. But first, a purple and yellow corsage in hand, he arrived to take Lilly to the prom. They posed for photos, all smiles. De La Torre even kissed a chicken.

It was a memorable night for both of them. De La Torre should have been a high school senior, but he left traditional school to take classes online and focus on his career, so this was an opportunity he may have missed back home.

"It was like my prom, too," he says.

Not long after, De La Torre moved into the guest house at Child’s Nashville home, was given the keys to an old beat up black Ram truck and became a member of the family. 

His home base has been Nashville ever since that fateful prom night five years ago

He began studying acting at Actors Bridge, training with vocal coach Michelle Prentice and putting his core self-titled band DE LA TORRE together with Prentice's son Johnny on lead guitar and Landon Hall on drums.

He went to Cuba for a month alone to immerse himself in the Latin culture and find a sound. He met X Alfonso, one of Cuba’s biggest rockstars. He transitioned from slow Spanish ballads to a more upbeat sound. “Rock and stuff,” as he describes it, chuckling at his eloquence.

He spent two years working non-stop in the studio with Child.

His band is Nashville-based, and over the last year he’s also been traveling all over the world for his movie roles.  

So enters his debut as the young Johnny Depp.

Becoming Jack Sparrow

When it comes to lifetime idols, De La Torre names Jim Carrey and Depp as his favorites. As a kid, he watched Ace Ventura every night before bed for two years straight. 

“No joke,” he says. 

And he had a similar obsession with all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.

So, when he got word of the casting call to play the young Jack Sparrow, he felt ready. 

He watched all four movies again several times in a row, practiced his unsteady walk and hand gestures with his girlfriend, and showed up for his audition in complete character — trinkets and braids in his long hair.

He found out he got the part on a plane flight home from Vancouver where he was on location for another movie, Lords of Chaos. He wasn’t shy about screaming in his airplane seat.

"I called Desmond immediately," he says. "I was so happy."

He had a show later that night with the band, and he spent the entire time on stage acting like Jack Sparrow. He couldn’t get it out of him. 

Then came the real thing.

De La Torre was needed for his skin, to use on Depp's face through computer effects to make Jack Sparrow look young.

On the Pirates of the Caribbean set, Depp and De La Torre would do the same scenes with high-tech image tracking dots on their face. De La Torre would watch Depp do a take, and then he would mimic his actions.

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"It's the coolest and weirdest thing ever to have Johnny Depp watch you do Jack Sparrow," De La Torre says. "But he was nice. He was like: 'Bloody hell, he's very good.'

"It was a crazy experience."

The last take Depp did, he came down off the set, smiled at De La Torre and gave him a hug. 

Then, a couple months later, De La Torre was on to the next big thing — back on stage with his band opening for Bon Jovi at Viejas Arena.

The group is currently putting the finishing touches on their debut album "Matador" to be released in 2018.

And he credits it all to one blind date to a prom in Nashville.

"Doors open and sometimes people don’t take them," De La Torre says. "I just had the feeling that I wouldn’t get another opportunity like that."

Reach Jessica Bliss at 615-259-8253 and jbliss@tennessean.com. You can also reach her on Twitter @jlbliss.