orlando bloom
Orlando is in Bloom! We catch up to chat Unlocked.
After shying from the spotlight for a few years, a more mature Orlando Bloo m is back in the headlines. Total Film talks to the older, wiser star about conspiracy thriller Unlocked, Pirates Of The Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge and turning 40.
Orlando Bloom is 40. That’s right, the silken-skinned, pretty-boy actor who rocketed to fame and the apex of every Hottest This and Sexiest That list by wielding a bow in
The Lord Of The Rings and a double-edged sword in the first three Pirates Of The
Caribbean movies, is now at one of life’s milestones – a number, in the Bible, associated with trial and tribulation. He must be concerned, right? His film career, after all, has been ostensibly rather quiet these last five or six years, and despite playing literature’s greatest lover boy in a Broadway production of
Romeo And Juliet in 2013, his days as a teenage heartthrob are now behind him.
“I’m no less driven,” he counters, ensconced in his LA home, the passion in his voice attesting that these are no empty words. “I have a six-year-old son, and I made a conscious choice to be present for my child at a period when me and his mum [ Australian
model Miranda Kerr] were separating. I’d never regret that. Now that everything is more settled – she’s happy and engaged, and I’m happy with a stable home environment – I have a deep desire to work. I’m fortunate that I don’t have to jump into stuff; I can be selective. I’m excited about it.”
As well he might be given he teasingly admits to having a number of movies currently slotting into place, none of which he can talk about just yet, and a handful of enticing films already locked and loaded. Two of these will hit UK screens in May, as Bloom goes boom with the double-whammy of Pirates Of The Caribbean: Salazar’s
Revenge and, first up, terrorist conspiracy thriller Unlocked, in which forceful action sequences and nogginnoodling duplicity play out against the threat of biological attack.
“Noomi Rapace plays a CIA operative – a sort of a female Bourne – and John Malkovich, Toni Collette, Michael Douglas and myself all come in and have an impact on the journey of her character,” he starts after a warm English greeting that sees the term ‘mate’ tossed around a lot. “[ I play Jack Alcott,] a roguish character employed to gather information by any means necessary. In the world these guys inhabit, that can be violent. I had the opportunity to create a character people haven’t seen from me before – he’s a mercenary who will go to any levels to get what he needs to fulfil his own mission.”
Salazar’s Revenge, meanwhile, sees Bloom once more step into the boots of heroic Will Turner. Will wasn’t in fourth instalment
On Stranger Tides, so it’s been 10 years since we left him at the finale of
At World’s End, captaining the Flying Dutchman and charged with escorting souls lost at sea to the next world. His return, though a small role in a big movie, is key to launching
Salazar’s action. “I have the first and the last scene,” Bloom explains. “I got a call from the Disney family to say, ‘We want to bring you in and introduce your son in this movie.’ I said, ‘Of course.’ When we left Will he was banished to the bottom of the ocean, so he’s going to be a bit crusty. [ laughs] Then my son [ Brenton
Thwaites] goes off on this adventure to free his father. My son has a girl, which is a throwback to me and Keira, and Johnny does what he does so well, and Javier Bardem [ as the titular antagonist, a ghost pirate who escapes Devil’s Triangle and sets about hunting all pirates – especially Jack Sparrow, with whom he has previous] is just eating the scenery. He’s amazing!”
Despite reportedly costing somewhere between $320-$350m,
Salazar’s Revenge will mark a conscious return to the propulsive thrills and spills of 2003 original The Curse Of
The Black Pearl. The first two sequels, both directed by Pearl’s Gore Vebinksi, became increasingly unwieldy, a trend only built upon by Rob Marshall when he took the wheel of the franchise’s fourth instalment. Sure, these bloated blockbusters all plundered enough box-office treasure to make Smaug roar with envy (if we may cross-pollinate Bloom franchises for a moment), but critics aimed cannonballs. The latest directors to steer Disney’s prized ship are Norwegian duo Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg, who are no strangers to fashioning adventures on the high seas, having helmed the Oscar-nominated Kon-Tiki and episodes of Marco Polo.
“I feel like they’ve landed en pointe,” declares Bloom. “They’ve recaptured the simplicity and charm. I’ve seen the film and it’s fantastic. Really entertaining.” And does he think that audiences desire this fifth instalment… and even a sixth if this one repeats the trick of sailing past the billion-dollar mark? “The first thing my son wanted when we went to the Lego store was not a spaceship
but a pirate ship,” he says by way of an answer. “I do think they’d like to do one more. It was alluded to me that there would be room for something else. But let’s see.” Born in Canterbury, Kent, in 1977, Orlando Jonathan Blanchard Bloom acted in school plays and joined the National Youth Theatre in London at the age of 16. From there he went on to attend the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and landed, during this time, bit parts in Casualty,
Midsomer Murders and Smack The Pony. But it was post-graduation that his career really took off – a whole two days post-graduation to be precise, when he was cast as Sindarin elf Legolas in Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord Of The
Rings trilogy. In the summer of 2003, four months before The Return Of The
King concluded Jackson’s trailblazing epic, the first Pirates movie splashed into multiplexes.
“Two really big trilogies; it’s a head-spinner; no one prepares you for that,” he now admits. “I feel really fortunate because those films have gone down in history – a lot of actors never have that. But I was very exposed for that whole period of my life.”
This intrusion was metaphorical and literal, as his 2002 to 2006 relationship with Kate Bosworth was poked into by the tabloid press, and, in 2009, thieves broke into his Hollywood Hills home to make off with jewellery and cash to the tune of £300,000 (as immortalised in Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring). People stealing from him, be it his privacy or personal goods, is an aspect of his life that hasn’t changed: the press jumped all over his relationship with Katy Perry from the moment the couple were spotted snuggling at the Golden Globes afterparty in January 2016; in August, they were papped on a beach, with a buff and in-the-buff Bloom paddle boarding his way towards breaking the internet (the Guardian even ran a piece on why we so badly wanted to see his pixelated penis); and when the announcement came, in March, that “Orlando and Katy are taking respectful, loving space at this time”, articles ran with screaming headlines such as ‘Orlando Bloom’s Been Kissing Other Girls, And Liking It!’
“I selectively don’t look at it,” he responds, calmly, when asked how he deals with it. “You can only live day by day, and when your head hits the pillow, think, ‘Well, I did my best today.’ Obviously tabloids sell stories, and if they’re positive, they don’t sell as well as they do if they’re negative. They’re always going to put a spin on things and create an idea of something.” He points to his decade of work with Unicef as a means to maintain perspective. “I’ve just come back from Nigeria where you see how these kids have witnessed Boko Haram slit their parents’ throats. The rest of the world is Disneyland relative to what some people are going through.”
Bloom’s work also keeps his head straight. During the time he primarily dedicated to raising his son, he returned to Middle-earth in parts two and three of the Hobbit trilogy (“They have a lot of integrity because that material is so close to the hearts of Peter Jackson, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens,” he responds, rather politically, when asked if he feels they match up to LOTR), and partnered Forest Whitaker as an alcoholic, pill-popping detective working the mean streets of Cape Town in Zulu. This knack of shuffling big movies ( Troy, Kingdom Of Heaven, The Three Musketeers) with smaller films ( The Calcium Kid, The Good Doctor, Digging For Fire) has always been part of his game plan, but now, at 40, he’s determined to opt for projects that allow him to “learn and grow”. “I did a movie last year called Romans that’s written by Geoff Thompson, who is a victim of child abuse,” he says. “It’s a very graphic, detailed telling of what that process is for a man, and what it takes to heal through that. Also last year, I did an HBO Special, Tour De Pharmacy, with Andy Samberg, who I think is a comic genius. It’s about doping in biking, and it’s a fun, comedic turn. And I just did a heist movie in Shanghai called Smart Chase. It’s a full Chinese production. It’s not like The Great Wall – it’s not big budget and it’s much more a youth culture movie. China is a huge emerging market for film and I wanted to have a presence there.” He pauses, takes stock. “It’s impossible to gauge what’s going to land with an audience, and making films is like trying to capture lightning in a bottle,” he says. “But as long as I’m true to myself, I’m happy.”