Interview: Orlando Bloom

THE last time Orlando Bloom played to packed cinemas he was adrift on his adventures with the Pirates Of The Caribbean back in 2007, shackled seemingly to his fate as the eternal captain of the Flying Dutchman.

Now, more than four years after surrendering his role in the Pirates franchise, Bloom is swashing his buckle once again, although this time out he’s the bad guy, playing the villainous Duke of Buckingham in director PWS Anderson’s 3D reimagining of The Three Musketeers.

“Can you imagine having been in three Pirates movies and seeing everyone else chew up the scenery?” asks Bloom, 34, recalling his character in that trilogy, Will Turner, a rather tame dandy in comparison with Johnny Depp’s inimitable Captain Jack Sparrow. “That’s why playing this role in The Three Musketeers was so appealing. The fact that the director, Paul Anderson, was thinking of me for the Duke of Buckingham and not the likes of D’Artagnan, I loved that. This was the direction I had been itching to go in. After I had finished Pirates, I was like, ‘Which way is up?’ ”

Indeed, after breaking out as the pretty-if-prosaic elf archer Legolas in The Lord Of The Rings trilogy (2001-2003), Bloom’s career took a stellar turn, spinning him upwards on a sharp trajectory, as he popped up in the likes of Black Hawk Down (2001) and Ned Kelly (2003), before signing on for the blockbusting behemoths that were Pirates (2003-2007), Troy (2004) and Kingdom Of Heaven (2005).

“After nearly ten years of really big movies, I needed to get some perspective,” adds Bloom. “If you stay in that world you don’t really have a chance. If you don’t stop to see the dust settle, you are just walking through a cloud and that’s kind of the way it was.” He found time for films like The Calcium Kid, Haven (both 2004) and director Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown (2005), but says: “I just couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Making those really big films was a fantastic experience, I loved it, but afterwards I wanted to drop below the radar a bit.

“The crazy thing is that after Pirates, The Three Musketeers is the next movie that most people will see me in, and they’ll probably go, ‘He is just doing another swashbuckling movie.’ But since I finished Pirates I have done four or five movies and they are all very different.”

In that time Bloom has appeared in a segment of the sprawling ensemble piece New York, I Love You (2009) and in Mark Ruffalo’s directorial debut Sympathy For Delicious (2010), in which he plays a raggedy old rocker. Two other projects in which he stars, Main Street and The Good Doctor, have yet to hit cinemas.

“They are all very small movies, and not the sort of thing that people are going to queue up round the block for at their multi-screen, but creatively it is a whole different process, which I have enjoyed being in,” says Bloom, who is also an executive producer on The Good Doctor. “A smaller movie feels more like a family. It’s much more intimate, and that’s what I wanted – to carve myself a path and feel as though I was not so under the spotlight. I wanted to find my thing.”

During his four-year bid to find his thing, Bloom has done much, taking on his first professional theatrical production, In Celebration, at the Duke of York’s Theatre, “just to try to shock myself back into a new creative space after Pirates,” he says. He also took a two-month trip to the Antarctic with his cousin. “He is a science research bloke and was going on a trip down there, so I joined him.” Then, most importantly of all, he married his girlfriend, the Australian model Miranda Kerr, tying the knot at a small ceremony in August 2010. The couple then welcomed a baby son, Flynn, in January. “My priorities have changed,” says Bloom somewhat wistfully, “not just in work but in life, settling down, having a kid; my priorities have shifted and I think now it’s more about not taking oneself too seriously and just enjoying the ride.” Despite the birth of his son, Bloom still loves to ride his motorcycle. “It’s safety first, but I’m not going to stop doing things that I enjoy.”

But try as he might, there’s no chance of Bloom leaving his blockbuster world behind him now that he is reprising the role of Legolas in Peter Jackson’s two-part rendition of The Hobbit which is currently shooting in New Zealand.

“It’s like it is in my veins,” he says, “so I’m really looking forward to The Hobbit and I think it is going to be wonderful. I’ll miss the fact that people like Viggo Mortensen are not going to be there, but Elijah Wood is coming back to do a little thing, and it’ll be great to work with Peter Jackson again and Ian McKellen and all the crew.”

Jackson’s version of The Hobbit will incorporate elements from Tolkien’s broader pseudo-mythological universe, most notably from The Silmarillion, as it bids to link the first Middle-Earth narrative to the broader trilogy. “This being a prequel to the Lord of the Rings is something that I have to take into consideration when playing Legolas, of course,” Bloom notes, “but I think that also gives me a little freedom too. I wondered at first whether I was going to be able to do it, but it’s a character that I really love and I know so well.”

Before Legolas’s re-emergence comes The Three Musketeers, in which Bloom lines up alongside fellow baddies Christoph Waltz, Milla Jovovich and Mads Mikkelsen, in what will prove a rather fanciful and loose adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s most famous novel. Young American Logan Lerman, who starred in Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, plays D’Artagnan.

“I have always been a real fan of the story and I saw the Douglas Fairbanks movie when I was a really little kid,” Bloom recalls. “Then I recently saw the Oliver Reed versions [The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers in the 1970s and then the one with Kiefer Sutherland in 1993]. It seems as though every generation has its own Three Musketeers movie and that’s because it’s a classic story that needs to be told and wants to be told. I think this is the perfect version for our generation.”

The actor likens his film’s pacing to Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney’s all-star Ocean’s movies. “To me it feel likes a very contemporary telling of the story,” he says. “I think that the weaponry, because the film was shot in 3D, feels very cutting edge, and just stylistically the script certainly reads very contemporary. It was like some of those moments where in Ocean’s Eleven they are all talking in the middle of a room and then suddenly it cuts to a big action scene.”

Once The Three Musketeers has hit cinemas and Bloom has finished on The Hobbit in New Zealand, he will return to London to film The Mandrake Experiment from screenwriter J S Hill, and will then shoot a Roger Donaldson movie called Cities with Clive Owen. His work, he thinks, is improving all the time. “I have got better,” he concludes, “and I have learnt how to deal a bit better with a life in the spotlight. When you step back it is not quite so aggressive and you can see how to sidestep it, how to swerve it, and you get more competent.” v

The Three Musketeers is in cinemas from 12 October