The role Orlando Bloom wishes he’d never played: “I didn’t want to do the movie”
If you’re excited about the new Christopher Nolan movie The Odyssey arriving next year (and who isn’t?), then one way you could assuage your thirst for brawny hot actors in sandals between now and next July is to watch 2004’s Troy starring Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom.
Just don’t mention it to Bloom directly, not that you probably have his number, because the Kent-born actor is not in any way a fan of the film, even though it’s now more than 20 years since he stepped into his tunic and curled his hair in order to appear in Wolfgang Peterson’s $200million action epic that was loosely based on Homer’s The Iliad. Ironically, Nolan was actually originally offered the chance to direct the film, but opted to helm Batman Begins instead.
Eric Bana and Diane Kruger co-starred with Bloom in the film that was a big hit with audiences, bringing in double its budget at the box office, but the man himself was very unsure of the whole thing before he even started filming.
He recently told Variety: “Oh my god, Troy. Wow. I think I just blanked that movie out of my brain, by the way. So many people love that movie, but for me, playing that character was just like [slits throat]. Am I allowed to say all of these things? I didn’t want to do the movie. I didn’t want to play this character.”
Bloom was hot property to say the least in the early part of the 2000s, having just completed the highest-grossing trilogy of all time in the form of Peter Jackson’s fantasy epic Lord of the Rings, and went straight from that to filming another huge franchise with Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean, albeit via a small role in Ridley Scott’s thrilling war movie Black Hawk Down.
Troy involved another long shoot on location, and Bloom wasn’t feeling it at all. He added, “The movie was great. It was Brad [Pitt]. It was Eric [Bana] and Peter O’Toole, but how am I going to play this character? It was completely against everything I felt in my being.”
Interestingly, Pitt ended up not liking the movie either, comparing his experience filming it negatively to working under the likes of David Fincher on Seven, saying: “It wasn’t painful, but I realised that the way that movie was being told was not how I wanted it to be. I made my own mistakes in it.”
Neither actor was adversely affected by the movie; however, by 2007, Bloom was one of the biggest male movie stars in the world and had appeared in four of the ten highest-grossing films of all time. Most recently, he starred in The Cut, a thriller set in the world of extreme weight loss for boxing matches and the Amazon Prime comedy Deep Cover with Bryce Dallas Howard. He also filmed a new movie called Wizards! with SNL’s Pete Davidson back in 2022, but the project remains unreleased in the three years since, with rumours that it received very negative feedback at early screenings.
Meanwhile, Nolan’s own Homer adaptation, the star-packed The Odyssey, remains the most anticipated film in recent memory, with IMAX screenings selling out and changing hands ten times over face value earlier this year, despite the film not being released for another 12 months.
