The actor Orlando Bloom always wanted to be: “One of my heroes”
For a while in the early 2000s, there was arguably no hotter star in Hollywood than Orlando Bloom, who enjoyed one of the most fortuitous starts to any career in recent memory.
After debuting with a small part in 1997’s biographical drama Wilde, Bloom didn’t appear in his next feature for another four years, but when he did, a storm of circumstance strapped the rocket to his back and propelled him all the way towards the industry’s A-list.
Five of his next six movies were Ridley Scott’s acclaimed and two-time Academy Award-winning war drama Black Hawk Down, Peter Jackson’s monolithic The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Disney blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which isn’t a bad way for an unknown to set about securing superstardom.
That quintet hoovered up critical acclaim, awards season recognition, and billions of dollars at the box office, and it looked like Bloom was a made man. Serving as the narrative instigator of Wolfgang Petersen’s historical epic Troy was another feather in the cap, reinforcing his position as one of the fastest-rising names in the business.
With the best of intentions, though, Bloom’s downfall was that he wasn’t a particularly good actor. Once he was removed from his franchise-friendly comfort zone and asked to shoulder the burden of a film as its leading man, the wheels started to fall off.
He never did manage to recapture that initial momentum, which is ironic when he named one of his early co-stars as the model he’d love to emulate. Whereas Bloom went from big budget fame to struggling in smaller productions, his Pirates of the Caribbean co-star Johnny Depp went the complete opposite way.
The swashbuckling saga’s figurehead gained fame as one of independent cinema’s most daring and eclectic darlings before Jack Sparrow turned him into a global sensation. They were ships passing in the night in that regard, with Pirates marking the meeting point between two very different trajectories.
Reflecting on that experience in a conversation with the BBC, Bloom saw his scene partner as an inspiration for where he potentially saw himself heading. “I got to work with one of my heroes, Johnny Depp, and to see how he goes about the business, which was really inspiring for me at this stage in my career,” he explained, with Pirates marking the first time Depp had ever taken top billing in an eye-wateringly expensive Hollywood epic after years on the indie grind.
Having already worked on The Lord of the Rings, he was the more experienced of the two, but Bloom nonetheless admitted he’d “love to be Johnny Depp”. Fast forward two decades, and he may not be of the same mind, but for a while, Depp’s desire to balance outlandish fare with high-paying blockbuster gigs was his younger co-star’s benchmark.
