Me, My Elf, and I

He plays the ageless elf Legolas in The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. He’s part of a film franchise that should live on as long as the medium itself. His fan base is so large and fervent that we doubt his start will ever fade. But underneath it all he’s a down-to-earth, charming English bloke with a taste for bungee jumping and tattoos. He’s Orlando Bloom, but of course you knew that. Read on to find out more.

With his first big screen role out of acting school playing a 2931 year old warrior elf named Legolas Greenleaf in Peter Jackson's fantasy classic, The Lord of the Rings, Orlando Bloom hit the big time. Since then, the 25 year old heartthrob nicknamed Orli by pals has worked constantly; as an American soldier in Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down, as Heath Ledger's co star in the upcoming The Kelly Gang, and now continuing his success as Legolas in Lord Of The Rings 2.

"It's incredible really," says the London-based actor of his success. "I graduated from drama school and just walked into this job and it's been probably one of the most life-changing, exciting and memorable experiences of my life."

Although the LOTR trilogy is an ensemble piece, Orlando has got the "It" factor, the indefinable power that makes a star. An Internet search on his name came up with over 29,000 results and there's fifty fans joining his fan clubs every single day (something he finds weird as he is a technophobe with no email address and no computer!).

So are women throwing themselves at him these days? "No, not really," he grins. "I look completely different in LOTR. I have long blonde hair and blue eyes in it so people still don't recognize me much."

But Orlando is "excited and slightly intimidated" about being part of the film's incredible success and hopes the two sequels will be just as popular. "It feels surreal to be involved in such a great project that has led to such a lot of interest in me personally. I'm trying to enjoy it all for what it is. You can be up one minute and drop the next, so I'm trying to maintain a steady course so that I have some longevity."

The success hasn't gone to his head, he says, because his sister, Samantha Bloom, 26, who is following in her brother's footsteps at London's Guildhall School Of Music And Drama, would never let that happen. He adds laughingly, “And I’ve surrounded myself with friends who would beat me if I tried to get above myself.”

Director Peter Jackson looked all over the world to find the right cast for the three part $360 million cinematic homage to JRR Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings. "There was a huge casting process that went on with this project," recalls Orlando. "Everybody I knew went up for a role. I went on tape for it, probably like a hundred thousand other actors across the world."

He tried out initially for a character called Faramir, but his agent got a call to say that Faramir wouldn't be available to him and would he read for Legolas? "I went back and read the books and tried to find out who Legolas really was. I was thrilled when they asked me to play him. I went on tape again and, after they'd checked out how tall I was and everything, I got the call to say I was in."

Orlando was two days away from graduating from drama school when he discovered he had got the part. "It was a moment in time that is forever crystallized for me," he says. "My agent called and she said, 'I've got some news. You've been offered The Lord of the Rings'. I was over the moon. And the very next day I got another call saying 'Do you want to do Midsomer Murders'?" He laughs. "I was 22, I hadn't left drama school and it was, like, 'Here, have a career.' Boom. There you go. It was like winning the lottery."

Although Orlando had read the LOTR books when the casting process began, he reread them when he went out to Wellington, New Zealand where all three films were to be filmed simultaneously over 18 months. "I found them perfect for everything I needed to know about my character," says Orlando, who found New Zealand far away from home in London's Notting Hill and his beloved dog, Maude, but he didn't mind. "Imagine being flown to this amazing country and being taught how to shoot a bow and arrow, learn sword fighting and horse riding—it was sick! I was pinching myself. Not until I’d filmed a few scenes did I finally believe it.”

Training began two months before the start of filming, in October 1999. "I was the first of the cast to arrive and the first thing they did was put a bow in my hand!" he laughs.

"I started using the bow and getting to grips with archery, so by the end of the week I was taking paper plates out of the sky, trying to get some real dynamic movement into the way I used the bow. Horseriding was also important, particularly in the second movie when there is a lot of riding. The Elvin style of fighting is based on an ancient European and Asian style of fighting, so I learned those kinds of styles with twin blades. Essentially, at the end of the day, I had to learn to slow down the movements for the camera and still make them look flashy." He also did movement training trying to find the physicality of the character. "I'd been watching Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai and I wanted to find the same way of walking, the same posture that would give Legolas this aura of centeredness and focus."

Through the hefty training schedule Orlando was injured. "I did some pretty wicked stuff on horseback. I mean, it really was insane what I had to do, but I had real faith in my horse, though I did fall off him once and broke my rib. That was one of my war wounds for the movie!"

When he first began filming, Orlando was intimidated by trying to bring Legolas to the screen. "I was like 'I've got to do everything I can to make the character as real as possible and to keep him as close to the book as I can because he's a character that people have created in their imaginations over years.' But at one point, I said to myself because I was so aware of it that it was actually blocking me I said, 'I've gotta let go. I've been cast to play Legolas because I have some quality I can use to try to bring this character to life.’ So I just did my best do to that.”

Orlando thought the physicality of Legolas was essential for him to get right. "Elves are immortal and have superhuman strength and have lived in the world for so long," he explains. "They are so graceful and elegant. So I spent time working on the physicality of the character and trying to develop an 'Elvin' quality, which Tolkien talks about in the books."

The only thing that got to be a bit of a drag, because it weighed so much, was his quiver and his bow strapped on his back. Wearing artificial ears was no problem. "They weren't uncomfortable other than the two hours that it took to put them on," he says. "I went home one day without the wig, but with the ears on, because I had a four hour break and it was the middle of the night. I crawled into bed with my girlfriend at the time and woke up with one of my ears stuck to the pillow and the other there in perfect form, with my ex girlfriend taking photos and laughing."

Orlando would have loved to have gone out in public with the ears on, but he wasn't allowed as the studio didn't want the press to find out how the characters in the film looked. "I had to wear a hooded jacket in the car on the way to the set and home every day too if I still had the ears on as security was really tight," recalls Orlando, who wasn't allowed to say anything about the production. "We weren't even allowed to take our own photographs. There were a lot of restrictions that were frustrating, but if you think there were 18 months of filming, if they didn’t keep security tight so much material could have slipped out. These movies were going to be released a year apart so they have to be careful. If everybody saw an image of something coming up in the second or third movie they may have thought, 'Oh well, I've already seen what those things look like' and they might have felt like that there was no element of visual surprise at all."

Orlando describes the production as "a labor of love, a very special project" but he wasn't really aware of the project's enormous scope until he arrived in New Zealand. "One of the first things I did was go to the special effects studio, and there was a warehouse full of armour, thousands of rows of armour and weapons, and that was the first point when I realized, 'Oh my God, this is huge!' I couldn't quite believe I was in the project until about a month into filming. Then when we finally saw some very rough snippets of a few scenes, which Peter showed us to help keep morale up and I finally, really understood what I was a part of and still couldn't really believe it!"

Orlando describes the months down under as "the best time of my life," enthusing, "I had a great house. The address was really cool: Marine Parade, Sea Town. The sea was right there. You could almost spit in it. I learned how to surf with Billy (Boyd) and then all the others joined in: Dominic (Monaghan), Sean (Astin) and Elijah (Wood). We were all a bunch of young guys so we became really close friends. I have friends for life because of this movie.”

“I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie,” continues Orlando. “I love really mad sports. That’s part of the reason why the whole New Zealand experience was so amazing for me. I went bungee jumping I went off at the highest bungee jump in New Zealand, 134m, like, six times. To throw yourself into the air with only something attached to your feet is a different head space altogether. And we went snowboarding as well."

All nine of the Fellowship actors got tattoos that said 'nine' in Elvish. Orlando's tattoo is on his wrist. "People got them everywhere and I think Elijah got his on his stomach, which is kind of unusual," tells Orlando, who has one other tattoo; of the sun, that he got at age 15.

Orlando went back to do extra shots for the sequel. Cast and crew were also originally, working in studios that weren't properly sound proofed and so all the dialogue had to be dubbed later for the first film and now the sequel. "I quite looked forward to go back to New Zealand for those pick ups," says Orlando, adding with a grin, "Really hard work—surfing, snowboarding, and skydiving, alongside the filming."

As a result, New Zealand feels like home for the actor. "I have a great warm feeling about New Zealand and I'm tempted to buy some land there, particularly with everything going on in the world at the moment, because New Zealand feels like a really safe place to be right now."

Orlando grew up in Canterbury in England and wanted to become an actor age 9 when he realized that Superman’s Christopher Reeve was an actor. “Once I realized Superman was an actor, I thought, ‘That’s for me.’ I got into acting because I had an incredible imagination, like most kids, and I was always drawn to these larger than life characters that I would see either at the theatre, on TV or at the cinema. Once I was old enough to realize that those characters weren't real, they were actors, I realized that I could be Superman or I could be The Hustler (with Paul Newman) or I could be Daniel Day Lewis's character in The Last Of The Mohicans I was like, 'Man, I can become an actor and be all of those things.' From then on, it was a done deal."

Orlando began acting at the National Youth Theatre and scored little parts in TV series like Casualty and London's Burning. Save for a throwaway line in the Oscar Wilde film, Wilde, with Jude Law, in 1997, he made his film debut in The Lord Of The Rings fresh out of his four years of studies at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Having received classical theatre training will he go back to the stage? "Theatre is something that I feel very important for an actor to keep doing," he replies. "I think it keeps you sharp. But at the moment I'm intrigued with movies and filmmaking. It hasn't lured me away from theatre, but I'm just going to try to ride this wave and then jump onto another and see how far it takes me."

At one point no career at all seemed to be in the cards as Orlando broke his back when he fell out of a window of some friends' London flat. "We'd just had a big Sunday lunch, I was trying to get on their roof terrace to kick in a warped door. I stepped on a piece of gutter. It didn't hold."

"I had a bit of a miracle recovery," he continues. "For four days they didn't think I would walk again. I walked out of the hospital after 12 days, pinned and plated. They did an operation and put me back together again. It refocused me, made me really appreciate life. But I'm very accident prone, I have to admit. I've broken my back, my ribs, my nose, both my legs, my arm, my wrist, a finger and a toe and cracked my skull three times."

The broken back experience would come in handy when his character in "Black Hawk Down" had a similar experience. "He falls out of a helicopter, this young green soldier anxious to fight," he says. "After I had my fall, I was in hospital lying right next to a young soldier with a paralyzing injury. It's surreal how life has these patterns."

To the relief of millions of females around the globe, there is no special girl in Orlando's life. "My career is about the most special thing in my life at the moment and my friends and family. But there's no romance," says the heartthrob, who refers to his ex-girlfriend as “a really big love."

His ex spent seven months with him in New Zealand during the filming of "LOTR." "It's sad it ended. I don't know what happened. We tried, but we didn't know how to handle it. That's life. People come into your life and people leave it. I have quite a sort of philosophical view on it. Certain things happen for a reason. You just have to trust that life has a road mapped out for you."

So, what does he do to chill out? "A huge part of my life is spent watching movies," answers Orlando, who would like to model his career path on Johnny Depp's. "Depp's made some interesting choices and he's preserved his integrity. I admire that in an actor. I also think Edward Norton's had a very interesting career and although Daniel Day Lewis hasn't had such a huge career, I love what he has done. He's a very talented actor."

Next up for Orlando is "Ned Kelly," about the 19th Century Australian bandits The Kelly Gang, in which he plays Ned's best friend, "a bit of a ladies' man, Irish accent kind of thing." It was filmed in Australia with Heath Ledger and opens early next year.

"I've had this incredible start to my career, and I'm being a little bit selective at the moment," he says. "I've had some very nice offers for some stuff coming up, both British and American, and I'm traveling between the two trying to work out which one is going to work at the right time."

He flashes a broad smile. "I have a great job, getting to dress up and become somebody else, especially when it's someone like Legolas, this super cool kind of otherworldly elf. I'm lucky, man.”

"It's looking really good," he says of his career. "I have to keep pinching myself because I just can't believe it. I feel really privileged to be an actor, to be paid to do something I love.”

And he feels even better about his life, concluding, "I've had an interesting life and I feel very grateful. If I died tomorrow, I'd feel like I've lived a very full life. I've loved every moment and, through that, I've learned a lot about people and relationships. I try to apply a set of rules to life to make it easier and that normally means just being open and honest so you can enjoy it.

UPCOMING PROJECTS FOR ORLANDO

We'll spare you the corny pun of saying Orlando's career is in full bloom, but it really is. He has a bunch of new movies coming out next year, and FiRST is happy to give you the highlights.

THE KELLY GANG

This movie tells the story of the famous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly. Ned was the sort of guy who wasn't satisfied with just robbing banks and hijacking trains Ned actually hijacked a whole town. The film is based on a novel by Robert Drew, and stars Heath Ledger and Naomi Watts. Orlando plays Joe Byrne, a good friend to Ned, and also something of a ladies' man.

THE PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN

Anyone who's ever been to Disneyland should have a good idea of what this film is about. And even if you haven't, no points for guessing here it's about (that's right) Caribbean pirates. The film has an exciting cast including heartthrob Johnny Depp (Captain Jack Sparrow) and Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush (Pirate Captain Barbossa). Orlando stars as Will Turner--not much of a pirate's name if you ask US.

THE CALCIUM KID

This looks like a very cute little movie from the U.K. It's a mockumentary about a young milkman named Jimmy, an amateur boxer who somehow winds up fighting the World Champion. Something like Rocky, but with a quirky British twist It will be interesting to see Orlando in a comedy. Somehow, he's just too good-looking to be be funny, huh?

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING

Well, this one is no big surprise. Everyone knows The Lord of the Rings is a trilogy. This film basically has the same cast and director as the first two films, there's not much to tell you. But you might be interested to know that…well, we can’t tell that either. Oh well, we’ll tell you more next year.

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