Orlando Bloom says he 'blanked' “Troy” role out of his memory because he 'didn’t want to play this character'
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"Am I allowed to say all of these things?" the actor asked.
Nearly 20 years after its release, Orlando Bloom is finally ready to talk about how much he absolutely detested starring in Wolfgang Petersen’s epic, Troy.
The actor, who played the self-centered Paris, revealed in a recent Variety video that he’s “blanked that movie out of my brain” because of how much he can’t stand his character.
“So many people love that movie, but for me playing that character was just like [slits throat],” Bloom said, making the motion with his hand. “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.”
Warner Brothers/courtesy Everett
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Loosely based on Homer’s Iliad, Troy follows the events of the Trojan War and features a star-studded cast that included Bloom, Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Peter O’Toole, Diane Kruger, Brian Cox, Sean Bean, and Brendan Gleeson. It is Bloom’s character who incites the war when he strikes up an affair with Queen Helen (Kruger) of Sparta and then sneaks her aboard his ship home.
While Bloom acknowledged that the movie itself was “great” — specifically shouting out Pitt, Bana, and O’Toole’s performances — he admitted that it was difficult to play such a cowardly character.
“It was completely against everything I felt in my being. At one point, [the script] says, ‘Paris crawls along the floor having been beaten by somebody and holds his brother’s leg.’ I was like, ‘I’m not going to be able to do this,’” he recalled. “One of my agents at the time said, ‘But that’s the moment that will make it!’ And I completely fell for that line of an agent. I think that’s why I blanked that from my mind.”
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He’s not the only one who doesn’t look back at the film fondly. Back in 2019, Pitt told the New York Times that he was “disappointed" by it too.
“I had to do Troy because — I guess I can say all this now — I pulled out of another movie and then had to do something for the studio. So I was put in Troy,” Pitt said at the time. “It wasn’t painful, but I realized that the way that movie was being told was not how I wanted it to be. I made my own mistakes in it.”
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He explained that the film “became a commercial kind of thing” along the way. “Every shot was like, here’s the hero! There was no mystery,” he added. “So about that time I made a decision that I was only going to invest in quality stories, for lack of a better term. It was a distinct shift that led to the next decade of films.”
In Entertainment Weekly’s review, critic Lisa Schwarzbaum described Troy as “pageant long but not deep, noisy but not stirring, expensive but not sumptuous.” She also called out the film for stifling Bloom's performance, writing, “As Paris, Bloom briefly reaches, Legolas-like, for a bow and arrow — but the gesture only draws attention to the cramped space in which the stirring young actor has to work, compared with what he could make of a well-handled quiver as an elf.”
She noted, “In a post-LOTR age — ye gods, in a post-Braveheart age, let alone in a contemporary time of terror, paranoia, and ceaseless skirmish — this is not enough to warrant such trumpets and drumbeats, such Enya-like keening between tableaux of Men Behaving Beefily.”
Watch Bloom reflect on Troy and his other films in the clip above.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.
