<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\nOrlando Bloom sits chewing banana and peanut butter on toast, having his morning tea on what could be the patio of a modest little house anywhere in the world\u2014watching his coal black mutt ramble around on the grass, chew twigs, and relieve himself. But little things everywhere hint that this is a partly fictional realm. Bloom is swathed in one of the long scarves he favors, covered in trinkets, and wearing combatweight black boots, but because he has become so extraordinarily wellknown for playing epic roles, the overall effect is of a man who is not quite modern but in modern dress. And this is no man's house but a lavish bungalow at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood. It's not even one of the Alist bungalows down on the main level, where John Belushi breathed his last. This one is far more grand\u2014seemingly oating above the hotel, insulated from the world by heavy gray wooden doors. It even has a private exit so that Bloom can come and go without fear of paparazzi.\n\nThe moment he speaks\u2014despite outward appearances\u2014it's clear that the only thing that isn't tinged with unreality is Bloom himself, who comes across as impossibly levelheaded. He is finishing his first role as a contemporary American man, a character in the fictional real world, in Cameron Crowe's new romantic comedy, Elizabethtown. \"Being a Brit, I've spent most of my time here either in New York or L.A.,\" Bloom says, unselfconsciously smacking peanut butter as he speaks. \"But during the Elizabethtown shoot, we were staying in the Brown Hotel, a classic, oldschool place in Louisville. Going to Kentucky was a whole different side of America I never knew about. It was America. The hats, the suits\u2014they're not letting go of their traditions. Which is great. I love traditions. I mean, cultural ones.\"\n\nIn contrast to his sensible demeanor, Bloom is abnormally goodlooking. And it's often hard to bear in mind how young he is\u2014how much work and fame he has gathered up in a scant four years. He is routinely on all the lists People's Most Beautiful, the Internet's Most Downloaded, you name it. But some fairly grim experience has made him play against type in real life. Laconically staring out over the fronds and high hibiscus of the Chateau and eating unripe blueberries, he doesn't hint at being aware of his Old Hollywood appeal\u2014and he certainly doesn't come off as ethereal.\n\nThere's nothing otherworldly about the inside of the house, either. It's a mess, scattered with health food, research, and mementos, much of which is still in bos, since Bloom has been living here a month during one of his downtimes with Kate Bosworth. In the bedroom is residue from old work There's a DVD about the Crusades, ancient homework for Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. Bloom grins and admits that while it's ideal to read entire books, DVDs have the appeal of being condensed and visual. \"Knowledge is power,\" he says\u2014\"but having too much can actually get in the way. You simply want to know what world you're in, and immerse yourself.\" He's taken time to hang a Cool Hand Luke poster, since he reveres Paul Newman. The kitchen is an aftermath of some kind of organicfood explosion. Everywhere you turn, there are protein shakes, containers of carrot and mango juice, oranges, tomatoes, and Lordknowswhat made out of tofu.\n\n\"I haven't gone back to being vegetarian,\" Bloom says, surveying the chaos. \"I've gone back to the process of seeing what foods give me energy. When you're working and you're required to switch it on, you need to know what fuels you.\"\n\nEven Sidi, the wild black dog, has a prized possession or two in the wilderness of bos and CDs and photos. Cameron Crowe has awarded the pup with a small framed Elizabethtown poster and signed it, \"Try to eat smaller portions.\"\n\nWalking out the door, one sees the least artful object in the house a sign, in fierce block lettering, that reads DO NOT LET THE DOG INSIDE! Sidi is explicitly banished from the house, given his taste for apocalypse. \"When I'm not here, he really tears up the place,\" Bloom says, as the lone crease in his forehead deepens slightly. \"He can be pretty devastating.\"\n\nIt was the same during the Elizabethtown shoots. Kirsten Dunst marveled at what a tearaway that dog could be, and says Orlando's trailer had to be \"Sidiproofed.\"\n\n\"They had to put a sheet of plastic on the oor!\" she says, laughing. \"That dog just doesn't care. And Orlando's way of unstressing between takes is to jump around like a 5yearold or ride on a pintsize scooter, whereas I'm more selfcritical. He was always playing with Sidi between takes, and Sidi is still in many ways a street dog.\" Then again, in many ways, so is Orlando.\n\nElizabethtown is vintage Cameron Crowe dead center in the crosshatch between comedy and drama. It opens with Bloom's character experiencing a professional failure\u2014more accurately, as his character narrates, a fiasco\u2014of staggering proportions. A shoe he has designed for an Oregonbased company clearly modeled after Nike is such a disaster that it's being recalled, losing the company 972 million, all of it Bloom's fault. To magnify Bloom's selfloathing, the head of the company played to the hilt by Alec Baldwin leads him on a daunting walk through the corporate complex, explaining the sheer magnitude of this disaster. At one point, the two gaze onto a vast, NASAscale ecological laboratory; Baldwin's character pauses and ruefully observes, \"We could have saved the planet.\" At another point, laughing out his grief, Baldwin remarks that he has read that Bloom's shoe \"may actually cause an entire generation to return to bare feet.\"\n\nBloom's character responds by creating an elaborate suicide machine and is on the brink of using it when he learns that his father has died He must travel to Kentucky to retrieve the body. So begins a chain of events that, as is so often untrue in Hollywood movies, is impossible to predict. Crowe doesn't deal in cinematic formulas. The film is strangely both intimate and sprawling, hitting a lot of giant themes\u2014fathers and sons, life and death, hope and regret\u2014through small, subtle encounters.\n\nIt's striking how easily Bloom fits into regular clothing and the twentyfirst century after having spent most of his career in chain mail, on horseback, or shouting things like \"The Ring must be destroyed!\" No film actor in memory has been so furiously attached to the epic and fantasy genres as Orlando Bloom. After making his debut as a rent boy in a 1997 film about Oscar Wilde, he spent three years at the Guildhall School of Music &amp;amp; Drama\u2014then, right out of the gate, landed the Legolas role in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Since then, he has rarely been seen without a sword or an arrow in reach in Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven; in Wolfgang Petersen's Troy; in the gritty Australian legend Ned Kelly; and, of course, in the still blossoming Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. If he were a few years older, he'd have been in Braveheart. That's a guarantee. The only exception was a very small role in Black Hawk Down, in which his character breaks his back\u2014but Bloom was cast partly because in real life he actually has broken his back.\n\nLiam Neeson, who starred as Bloom's father in the somewhat controversial Kingdom, is well attuned to the notion that an epic quality is not a card that every film actor has in his deck. \"Some actors suit period costumes,\" Neeson says, \"and others don't. I always think of Errol Flynn. He looked uncomfortable in a suit\u2014but put him in a ridiculous pair of tights, and he looked to the manor born! John Wayne playing Genghis Khan was quite the other thing. Clint Eastwood in a kilt would look ludicrous. I don't know what it is. Orlando simply looks the part.\"\n\nFrom their experience in Kingdom, Neeson and Bloom know that this particular talent can double as a curse, for Ridley Scott is an especially meticulous director. \"Even our underwear was period,\" Neeson recalls, laughing. \"It was the full bollocks, you know?\"\n\nAnd the epic quality is sufficiently rare that, once you've proved yourself in the genre, you are sought out again and again\u2014another impulse well understood and, for that matter, experienced by Liam Neeson. \"If I were Jack Warner, I'd get a team of writers, get 'em writing period pieces, and sign him,\" Neeson says. \"Orlando is like a classic '40s movie star.\"\n\nNone of this is to say that Neeson confines himself to speaking of Bloom's costumes; he seems a little amazed by how sharply focused the man is, especially for a young actor. \"When I was that age\u2014Jesus!\u2014it was the Dark Ages of my emotional growth,\" Neeson says. \"I knew fuckall about anythin'! Orlando is with it, but not in a hip way. He knows what it takes to make a film, so he treats every department equally the key grip, the gaffer, everyone. He's right to. Without them, we're nothing.\"\n\nThe fact that Orlando Bloom is unusually grounded for a man of 28, sadly, has a lot to do with the actual ground. His career and inextricably linked with that, his ability to take the long view was entirely transformed by a potentially fatal fall he took in 1998. Late one night, messing around, he leapt onto a drainpipe while trying to get onto a roof terrace; the pipe gave way, and Bloom fell three stories, shattering his vertebrae. \"Until then, I didn't have a healthy appreciation for life and death\u2014that we're not invincible,\" he says. \"And for four days, I faced the idea of living in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. I went to some dark places in my mind. I realized, I'm either going to walk again or I'm not.\n\n\"The doctor said he wasn't sure how severe the spinalcord damage was,\" he says, as an oddly unattractive look of distaste, even horror, crosses his features. \"I remember him telling me that, and staring at the ceiling, thinking, I never stared at ceilings before! And I wonder if I'm going to be looking at ceilings for the rest of my life.\n\n\"But there's something interesting,\" he adds very quickly. \"I knew I wouldn't. I knew I wouldn't, I knew\u2026\" He repeats the sentence five times\u2014quick like a stammer, as though he's still trying to convince himself against hope that this will not be his fate.\n\nThe upshot of the accident was nothing short of miraculous. He was in the hospital only a few weeks and walked out on his own power. And the minute he escaped, still constrained by a back brace, he reverted to testing the limits of body and soul. When the time came to remove the titanium pins from his spine, to the doctors' alarm, they were all fractured. They came out in shards. One of the pins had been driven too deep to remove, by dint of Orlando's physical overertion. \"I'd been doing stuff right away,\" he recalls, shaking his head. \"I went straight back into it, man.\"\n\nThe calming of Orlando Bloom, in the paradoxical underage dotage he now conveys, wasn't instantaneous. \"When I came out of the hospital, I started partying straight away\u2014with the back brace on. It took me a couple of months to realize this was my life, and I didn't want to mess it up.\n\n\"But that accident has informed everything in my life,\" he says. \"Until you're close to losing it, you don't realize. I used to ride motorbikes and drive cars like everything was a racetrack; it was ridiculous. It wasn't because I thought it was cool; it was just because I loved living on the edge. But I've chilled.\"\n\nCameron Crowe, too, sees all of this as key to Bloom's swift maturation as an actor. \"That broken back\u2014that's his Rosebud,\" Crowe says. \"It's the key to him. He's got pain going on in there. That's why his silent mode is so interesting. Where other actors feel they have to constantly do something, Orlando doesn't. Which is great. He's a real guy with real stuff. Under that puppydog energy, there's darkness.\"\n\nPerhaps it was Bloom's upbringing that made him capable of eventually slowing off of the racetrack. Growing up in Canterbury, and beyond that, the county Kent, exposes you to one of the world's cradles of sanity\u2014a meadowed realm of constancy\u2014even though some of its denizens look wild when viewed from afar.\n\n\"My generation in England was exposed to a huge antidrug campaign,\" Bloom recalls. \"I was one of the kids in school saying, 'That shit's not good.' I've still gotten kicks; don't get me wrong.\"\n\nAt this point in the conversation, without a single word of transition, Bloom moves from the romance of drugs to the intoxication of women. \"I remember asking my biology teacher, 'How is HIV and AIDS gonna come to an end?' \" he says, still popping the sour blueberries. \"And the guy said, 'When people stop having sex.' I replied, 'Dude, that's harsh. That ain't gonna happen anytime soon.' I had plenty of vices growing up. But when you're 21, you wake up and realize that your body is not something you want to fuck with.\"\n\nTo this end, Bloom has even surrendered caffeine\u2014which, for many Englishmen, would be as bitter a defeat as Gallipoli or Yorktown. \"I was doing night shoots for Elizabethtown,\" he says, \"and drinking green tea, which has caffeine. Not an awful lot. Just enough to get me through the shoot. By the end of the night, my back was killing me. It dehydrates your spine. And my back\u2014that's still my alarm. That's my canary in the mine shaft.\"\n\nBloom talks endlessly about how lucky he is; after seven years, the worst of his many reckless accidents hasn't faded from memory. \"When you experience the sort of physical pain I went through, you realize you're not a god,\" he says\u2014\"that there are limits to what you can do. It keeps you real. I mean, I can walk. I can enjoy a swim in the ocean and a beautiful day. And I was very close to not having that.\n\n\"I'm trying now to maintain a sense of balance. I was very extreme in my youth\u2014everything in extremes, man! I'm at a very interesting time right now a lot of change, growth\u2026a lot of pennies dropping. I've a lot to be grateful for.\"\n\nThis is all odd talk from an actor who, since that accident and many others, has buckled so much swash in the movies. To say nothing of the fact that, for The Lord of the Rings, he spent vast amounts of time in New Zealand, the adrenalinesport capital of the world, resisting most of those temptations. Yet when it comes to doing stunts, he doesn't hesitate. \"I have one of those doctors who tell me, 'Go for it, man!' \" he says. \"Does he encourage me? No. But I've tried to put myself in a physical condition where I'm able to do that stuff.\"\n\n\"And, of course, for sex,\" I toss out, just to lighten things up.\n\n\"Yeah, all those mercy lays I got,\" he says, mockwistfully. \"Because I was the kid with the broken back!\"\n\n\"Oh\u2014you need mercy fucks,\" I repeat, nearly spitting up my tea. \"That's the funniest thing I've heard in my life. You probably had to beg for it.\"\n\nBloom won't let go of the joke \"I was the kid with the broken back!\"\n\nBy all evidence, Orlando Bloom has chilled. But the adrenaline chip in his brain is still switched on. He seems to have transferred its capacity from bonebreaking feats to potentially soulcrushing risks on a more emotional plane. \"I like to feel alive, man,\" he says. \"Part of it is danger, part of it is love. Although I'm trying not to have those two realms cross too much. I've had a few dangerous women. My cousin once told me, 'You're tall, you're handsome\u2014and you're gonna have to apologize for it the rest of your life.' He imparted that information to me.\"\n\n\"So\u2026you're still looking for mercy fucks.\"\n\n\"That's right!\" he says, clinging to modesty with both hands. \"I still am. Exactly!\"\n\nIf, as he claims, Bloom is a bit accidentprone, he is among the most graceful clods ever born. He moves slowly but always seems to be out ahead of you; he gestures rarely, but when he does, every joint of every finger seems to be underscoring a different, subtle part of his idea.\n\nDespite all the old injuries broken bones all over his body\u2014here from a motorbike spill, there from something strange that happened with a rope, his athletic prowess is not lost on those with whom he's worked. Liam Neeson marveled at Bloom's fight scenes in Kingdom of Heaven. \"Some actors are utterly lost if you put a sword in their hands,\" he says. \"Orlando is all physical grace\u2014and there's Errol Flynn again!\"\n\nCameron Crowe, for his part, actually directed Bloom in the only television ad Crowe has ever shot, a quasi parody of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, shot in black and white, for Gap clothing. All we saw was Orlando Bloom and Kate Beckinsale running through shadowy streets. \"He has this Hard Day's Night physicality,\" Crowe says. \"Watching what we'd shot in the Gap commercial, there was Kate Beckinsale\u2014who's hot!\u2014and we couldn't stop looking at him. He's exploding with life.\"\n\nThe whole blend of modesty and the moviestar looks can only have contributed to Orlando Bloom's celebrity. In an average week, even with no film release in sight, he's in a hundred articles worldwide\u2014the more so when anything kindles or is stanched with the dazzling Kate Bosworth.\n\nThat said, he's not entirely allergic to Hollywood tricks. For instance, when celebrities stay at hotels, as most people know, they check in under false names, like Fred Flintstone or Jay Gatsby. Billy Bob Thornton, for instance, sometimes uses the name of a certain writer. For her part, Kirsten Dunst uses a musical reference.\n\n\"I'm not exactly sure what name Orlando goes by,\" Dunst says, \"but I bet it's something sexual. He's very irty. And that's easy to understand. You should have seen them in Kentucky Girls lined up holding signs with his name on them. He was very gracious.\"\n\nTypically, Bloom regards most attention as a eeting thing. And he's not interested in spending precious time on eeting things. Especially tabloid attention.\n\n\"That stuff is not a part of my daily life,\" he says. \"Most of it is bullshit. It even becomes hard to have a casual friendship, because suddenly you're 'linked to' that person.\u2026 I guess there's got to be a cost. You can't live the spoils without having the ip side of that coin. So you learn to live with it.\"\n\nCuriously, Bloom is so famous in costume that until recently he was able to blend in when he moved around in public. Cameron Crowe recalls that when the cast of Elizabethtown was shooting and living in Kentucky, girls were lining the streets just to catch a glimpse of Orly Bloom. Though no one except the tabloids actually calls him Orly.\n\n\"He was incredibly famous, but no one really knew what he looked like,\" Crowe says, still amazed. \"In Lexington, there was a girls' national soccer championship team in the hotel. These girls were actually walking the halls\u2014they were roaming in packs\u2014looking for him. I heard them saying things like, 'He's on the seventh oor!' And he was standing right there. Right there. He just disappeared into the culture.\"\n\nThat air of mystery is attractive to film directors. Crowe recalls reading something Warren Beatty once said\u2014that 75 percent of what people bring to a movie is their perception of the actor. \"In that sense, it's great to have a fresh guy to put in the center of a movie,\" Crowe says. \"We don't really know who he is. Orlando is a clean slate. Since Tom Cruise in Risky Business, very few guys that age have been able to do a comedy or drama and be that interesting to look at\u2014and to really hold the center of a movie.\"\n\nThese days, Bloom's mother more than compensates for his aversion to his tabloid press. And of course, when it comes to propriety and accuracy, British tabloids make their American cousins look like Huxley's Illustrated History of Gardening. She clips it all, keeps track of his status as \"the most downloaded human on earth,\" and shuffles through the bags of fan letters he receives. Bloom recoils. \"I keep saying, 'Mom, I don't want to know,' \" he says. \"I don't want to see whether I'm on some chart. There will be a time when I won't be. That doesn't mean I'm not grateful. But I keep telling her, 'They keep building me up, so they're going to tear me down!'\n\n\"I keep getting asked what it's like to be a heartthrob,\" he adds, much amused by the unspoken joke Tempus fugit. \"There's that next kid, believe me, who's right there on my tail\u2014and if he's not right now, he's gonna be!\"\n\nBloom is convincing when he says things like this offhand remarks a modest person would say so as not to seem like a preening, selfabsorbed ass in a magazine article. And when he says he has too much selfdoubt to believe the hype, there's not a trace of posturing. A casting agent once told him that a little selfdoubt will get you a long way It makes you work harder, keeps you sharp. \"If you think you can do it all,\" Bloom says, suddenly showing some heat, \"you're just gonna sit back. Whereas I'm constantly working at it doing more sword training for Pirates, getting coached on dialect to make sure it's as good as it can be for Elizabethtown. I'm always working, because the one time I don't, I guarantee, is when I'll end up saying 'D'oh!' \"\n\nHe looks at his enormous wristwatch somewhat worriedly, for he actually has a dialect session in an hour or so, and more than once he has registered that it's a real concern for him. It was also the sole doubt Cameron Crowe had in casting him, though that one doubt was quickly put to rest, Crowe says.\n\n\"Look, I just want to stay normal,\" Bloom says, very normally. \"That's the biggest challenge being able to sit in a caf\u00E9 and watch the world go by.\"\n\nGranted, wide is the road to temptation and\u2014at least until that next kid catches Orlando J. B. C. Bloom\u2014his world is a sea of temptations. But he prides himself on learning lessons, even other people's life lessons. \"My dad once told me that one of his dreams was coming to Los Angeles, getting a Mustang, and driving it down Sunset Boulevard,\" he says, beaming at the memory. \"One day, it came true. And he got pulled over by the police. Know why they stopped him? Know why? He was driving too slowly! That's a great story for me. He was soaking up the environment and he got done! 'Sir, you got done!' \"\n\nIn more than one sense, Bloom isn't finished. Even at the outset of his career, he's ever ickering with a Buddhist tendency here or there. He chokes at the fact that he's in an industry where it's a virtue to label its products including actors. Yet he has no idea what his label should read. \"I'm still trying to formulate the idea of who I am\u2014and part of the problem of having these ideas and images projected on you is that it's hard enough really figuring that shit out!\"\n\nEven in the Shangrila confines of Bloom's temporary home, time does not stop, and the hour is running late. At a dialogue coach's office across town, there's a new identity to burnish some \"R\" sounds to harden, a few \"A\" sounds to atten out. Orlando Bloom shakes his head and eats one last bad blueberry. \"There's only a story in success so far,\" he says, refusing to descend from the philosophical level before he ees the hotel out his private exit. \"That's why Cameron made a movie about failure\u2014about fiasco. Because we all meet in the dirt. That's where we meet.\"\n\nMarshall Sella wrote last month about Cameron Diaz."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/orlando-bloom-errol-flynn?currentPage=4>