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Skinny's not the word. Neither's brown. Nor tousled. And handsome, as a description,
really won't do. Orlando Bloom is thin almost to daintiness but he's tall,
which offsets that. He's tanned teak. And his cascading curls frame a face to
stop female hearts. At 26, GQ'S Actor Of the Year is about as credible a
slinky hipped hetero heartthrob as your girlfriends' little sister is likely
to lust after. I'm sorry, I don't like it any more than you do, but there it
is. Not only is he the hottest new kid on the Hollywood block but the boy Bloom
is young, rich, successful and –curses- charming, relaxed and scarily well
adjusted. And yes, ladies, he really is that good –looking.
As I pull up ion my cab he's sitting slouched in the sunshine on a Clerkenwell
kerb, chattering happily into his mobile phone. That's probably Jerry
Bruckheimer on the other end, or maybe its Brad Pitt. Perhaps it's his
girlfriend, Californian starlet Kate Bosworth, who made her name in the surf
movie Blue Crush and is soon to play Sandra Dee opposite Kevin Spacey in the
Bobby Darrin biopic Beyond the Sea. Most likely it's just one of his London
mates, planning this afternoon's shopping trip. There's no time to find out
because, almost as trainer meets pavement, Bloom's cracking a smile, offering
a hand and suggesting we go for a walk. It's such a nice day, after all.
He's wearing a tight white T-shirt, dark tracky bottoms with a stripe and Nike aqua
socks in black and red, accessories with aviator shades and a collection of
thrift-store trinkets which dangle from his slender neck. His fingers are
comprehensively ringed and there's a small tattoo on the inside of his left
wrist, J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish symbol for the number 9, which will forever mark
him as a member of the cast of the monolithic The Lord Of The Rings trilogy,
which shot him to insta-fame two years ago. The effect is international boho
hobo via London and LA. It's a look with a lineage that extends back to Keith
Richards, but its most notable exponent is Johnny Depp, Bloom's friend and
co-star in Pirates of the Caribbean, the good-natured summer swashbuckler
that's still doing business at the multiplexes.
One senses that a bit of Depp might have rubbed off on our Orlando, at
least style wise, just like a bit of Keith rubbed off on Johnny's kohl-eyes,
sea legged buccaneer in Pirates…
The reason for Bloom's presence in London- a rare thing these days, despite the
fact he’s recently bought a flat here- is that he's on a break from shooting
Troy, adapted from Homer by the modish New York novelist David Benioff, which
the director Wolfgang Petersen has been filming in Malta with Brad Pitt, Eric
Bana and Peter O'Toole. Bloom plays Paris, the pretty prince who sets off the
Trojan wars by stealing Helen from Sparta. While the production decamps to
Mexico where he’s due shortly, Bloom has time to reflect, at least briefly, on
a vertiginous career trajectory
A Kentish lad, from Canterbury, Bloom won the part of the funky blond elf Legolas
Greenleaf in Lord Of The Rings just two days before leaving London's Guildhall
School Of Music & Drama, where Ewan McGregor, Joseph Fiennes and David
Thewlis also studied. He spent the next 18 months in New Zealand working on
Peter Jackson's multi-Oscar-winning fantasy adaptation and appears to have
loosed enough arrows to pierce the hearts not just of Middle Earth's scary
hordes but also those belonging to a slew of Hollywood casting agents. Plus
little girls (and some bigger ones) all over the world.
He'd been working ever since, his profile and reputation increasing with each film.
First came Black Hawk Down, Ridley Scott's terrifying depiction of the US
military's ill-fated 1993 Mogadishu expedition, in which, in a strange echo of
his own life, Bloom played a solider who breaks his back. Then the second Lord
Of The Rings, The Two Towers, then Pirates...
All critical and commercial success. This month's he's in Ned Kelly,
an efficient Australian Western from the director of buffalo Soldiers, which
stars Heath Ledger as the doomed outlaw and Bloom as his sensitive sidekick, Joe
Byrne. That will be followed in December by The Return Of The King, concluding
Lord Of The Rings movie. Then, proving he's got the requisite number of
strings to his bow, The Calcium Kid, a small British film which gives him his
first bona fide leading role, as a milkman with a shot at the world boxing
title. And next year comes the epic Troy, which should cement his position as
among the most exciting new talents in film- a British Leonardo DiCaprio with
his head screwed on tight.
After that he may of may not give a gentle rib to one of his heroes, Daniel Day-Lewis,
in Eric Idle's Spaceballs- style Merchant Ivory spoof, The Remains Of The
Piano which starts Geoffrey Rush and Angelica Huston, with Billy Connolly as
Inspector MacGuffin and Patrick Stewart as Obie Ben Kingsley. Hmm. Could go
either way, that one. And Bloom’s yet to decide whether or not to hop aboard.
But
before all this there's the small matter of his GQ award, for which Bloom
seems genuinely appreciative. "It's amazing, isn't it ?" he says as we
begin our circuitous ramble around London, ECI.
"I
can't believe it. I'm very grateful. It's really lovely." Bloom
describes his life at the moment as both exciting and daunting. "I'm just
making the adjustments in my head to cope with all the changes that are
happening," he says. "It's
felt like everything's been moving quite fast for a while now but its keeps
changing gears. When you've got a film like Pirates... coming out it changes
up another gear, because it's a big Jerry Bruckheimer Disney production and
there's a lot of money behind it. It really feels like my first big Hollywood
experience. There’s a lot of responsibility."
Bloom in conversation is an engaging combination of touchy-feely street speak and a
very British, can't-quite-take-it-all-seriously unpretentiousness. So while he
can talk happily about "keeping it real", "losing his shit", getting
"into his flow", keeping certain areas "on a low pro", living
"a bit
more on mellow tip" and "maintaining a sense of self" (shouldn’t that be
"sense of elf ?") he also frequently pulls himself up short. And he's very
conscious of not appearing to have lost touch. "Someone wrote in an article
that I've got an assistant," he says. "That makes me sound like such a
wanker, thanks very much : 'Ooh, he's got an assistant now.' I've just
got a mate who helps me out. Big deal.
"I always think
it's such crap when you hear an actor talking about what he
does," he says at one point, in answer to an admittedly God awful question
about the motivation behind Legolas, his character in LOTRs. "Isn’t it short
of wanky ?" He's right, of course. But he instantly comes up with a very
persuasive, completely compelling case. "It's a no brainer," he says.
"An elf ! Elves have superhuman qualities, they're angelic spirits, they're
immortal, they're ageless, they're just like these invincible fucking
samurai-esque ancient dudes! Who wouldn't want to fucking get in the skin of
that ?"
Bloom swears a lot, "probably because I'm back in London." He asks if I can cut
some of the expletives out, "because it makes me sound like such a..." But
he can't think of the word without swearing again, so we decide to leave it.
"Oh, I don't care really," he concedes. It's not easy, you know, this
going-on-the-record business. "What
you see is what you get. My cards are on the table and if you want to sniff
around you can. I’m not ashamed of anything. I've been lucky."
Luck
is a constant theme in Bloom's story and something he returns to often. But
his life, while certainly golden of late, has not been without its
complications. He comes from an arty family, hence the wonderfully literary
name, courtesy of the Virginia Woolf character but redolent also of James Joyce.
His dyslexia meant he found school "hard graft" be he knew from a very early
age- "primary school, probably" – that he wanted to perform, a decision
encouraged by his mother, Sonia. He discovered at 13 that the man he thought was
his father, the Jewish-South African lawyer and anti-apartheid campaigner Harry
Bloom, who died when Orlando was just four, turns out not to have been. In fact,
the man he always considered his stepfather is his real dad. He doesn't want
to talk to specifically about his private life- "some things have to be for
me," he says, "at some point you draw a line" – but it must have been a
shock.
Then there's his back, which Bloom says, "still gives [him] gyp." He broke it,
badly, while at college, falling three storeys from a friends’ roof after a
drainpipe came loose. "Probably the making of me, that was," he says.
"A
wake-up call to life and responsibility and respect for myself. It made me go, 'You fucking idiot. How could you even think of doing
that ? How could you have
not think that through ?' For a while I wasn't going to be able to walk. I
wasn't going to be able to finish my course. I may never have been able to
act." Somewhat miraculously, however, 12 days after having been told he might
spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, the 21-year-old Bloom walked out of
hospital on crutches. "The fact that I survived and I'm doing what I'm
doing, playing the roles I'm playing, it's like a whole new lease on
life."
It may explain his quite extraordinary level-headedness, considering at the amount
of exposure he's getting. During our walk we stop into a newsagent to buy a
bottle of water and there's Orlando on the magazine stand, gazing out from the
cover of teen fashion bible, The Face. He hasn't got any money on him so I buy
him a copy and we leaf through it. He seems a bit bemused by the pictures but
pleased enough. "I used to like The Face when I was growing up," he says.
Then, when we step out into the sunshine again, there he is on the other side of
the road, plastered to a bust stop, gazing broodingly from a poster for
Pirates…
"I'm not stupid, you
know ?" he says when I remark on this. "When you start to
realise that there's pressure on you, you have to face up to it whether you
like it or not. There's responsibility. There's professionalism. There's
integrity towards the work and towards yourself. Sometimes I want to be a kid
and go, 'Fuck it all !' and run away and bury my head. And then I go, "Look, be realistic. You chose this path. So fucking deal with it. Be a man
about it.' But I do constantly feel like putting the breaks on."
He's also conscious of the often-fleeting nature of celebrity. "Look, man, you see
it happen,”" he says. "It can be there one minute and gone the next. One
minute you're GQ Actor Of The Year and the next minute... I just don't feel
anything in this industry is solid." He says he’s taken advice from Depp and
Pitt and Viggo Mortensen, his Lord Of The Rings co-star, who had "a huge
influence on my life." He admires the fact that all three have found a way to
deal with the attentions of fans and the media without withdrawing from the
public eye. He tells a story about a night out with Brad Pitt in Malta recently,
when the star was mobbed in the street by local well-wishers as well as off-duty
US sailors. "He had a bodyguard with him," says Bloom. "I mean, that's
kind of intense that you need a bodyguard with you. That kind of wigs me out to
be honest. But I admired so much the way Brad had grace and composure in that
moment. He had a bit of a wild look in his eye because obviously it was freaky,
man. But he handled it really well."
Like Brad and Johnny, Bloom has also had to contend with the strange phenomenon of
becoming a pin-up. When I congratulate him on taking some of the pressure off
Justin Timberlake, he laughs. "I just wanted to be an actor," he says.
"The fame bit follows." But he has given it some thought.
"The more hectic
everything gets the more I come back to the simper things in life," he says.
"I really enjoy just walking the streets like this. I really enjoy taking my
mum out for lunch with my gran, or going to see a movie, or having dinner with
some mates. I guess the sad thing that dawns on me sometimes is the more I do
this [acting] the harder its' going to be to do that stuff." For a second,
he looks a little baleful and lost. But he's quickly back into his stride.
"I've been doing films that I love and I've had some great opportunities. I just
happened to be around when they were looking for people who were slightly
unknown that they could take and use for three movies. And with Black Hawk Down,
I was coming into LA for the first time and that was the first meeting I go
after LOTR's. And I got the part, which was just unbelievable. And I hear
myself talking about it and I go, "Fuck ! Ridley Scott, are you kidding ?" And
I'm aware that there are hundreds of brilliant actors out there who just need
that opportunity. It's when you get that opportunity, if you can capitalise on
it when you can go forward. And the very fact that I got that opportunity is
what I'm constantly thanking my lucky stars for."
He has carefully, and quite deliberately, avoided the celebrity party circuit.
"I
got a lot of that stuff out of the way when I was younger," he says, referring
to his days on the London club scene in the early Nineties. Now he'd rather
spend Saturday night with friends and a bottle of wine. And while he won't
deny enjoying the globetrotting and gallivanting that comes with the movie star
territory, he's looking forward to taking some time off once Troy is finished.
"One thing I've learnt," he says, "is I'm not going to be happy just
from earning money and making movies."
"It's weird," he says.
"I'm
interested to see how I fare back in the world of normality. Because I haven't
stopped to think about operating in life without work and the structure that
creates."
What
will he do ? "Drive around the country a bit, maybe. I haven't even bought a
car yet. I fancy reading some books, listening to some music, doing up my place.
See my mates, my family. Try and enjoy it."
And
with that he's off back to his hotel where a friend is waiting. They're
going to the Harrods sale to see if they can pick up some furniture for
Bloom's new place. Who knows- by the time you read this, he may even have
found the time to spend a night there. |
