Time Capsule Orlando Bloom
THE INTREPID STAR ON HIS STORIED CAREER
WORDS CHRIS HEWITT
“I FEEL OLD,” laughs Orlando Bloom (who’s only 48). For the last half-hour or so, Empire has shown Bloom a succession of photos from his impressive CV. Quite a few of those come from Bloom’s incredibly fertile period in the early 2000s, when he was the Next Big Thing, swashbuckling it up a storm in the Lord Of The Rings movies, Pirates Of The Caribbean and its sequels, and more. And each picture from the halcyon days has elicited a look of horror. “I was so young, and so wet behind the ears, and probably in a permanent state of anxiety in one form or another, but pretending I wasn’t,” he says. Now, Bloom is experiencing a second bloom as an excellent character actor (see this month’s The Cut for details), and you sense this is just the beginning. “The best,” he says, “is yet to come.”
SPARRING PARTNERS THE CUT(2025)
“Caitríona [Balfe] plays my life partner and training partner, and we’re going through our daily training routine. This kind of work as a partnership helps with the headspace as much as it does with the life stuff. One of their love languages is working out and training. Caitríona was amazing. We had to learn those routines, and it wasn’t easy to do what she’s doing there. It’s like learning a dance routine. We shot this in the Peacock gym in the East End, a famous old boxing gym that’s now used mostly as a location.”