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Orlando 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—watching 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 combat-weight black boots, but because he has become so extraordinarily well-known 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 A-list bungalows down on the main level, where John Belushi breathed his last. This one is far more grand—seemingly floating 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.
The moment he speaks—despite outward appearances—it’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, old-school place in Louisville. Going to Kentucky was a whole different side of America I never knew about. It was America. The hats, the suits—they’re not letting go of their traditions. Which is great. I love traditions. I mean, cultural ones.”
In contrast to his sensible demeanor, Bloom is abnormally good-looking. And it’s often hard to bear in mind how young he is—how 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—and he certainly doesn’t come off as ethereal.
There’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 boxes, 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—“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 organic-food explosion. Everywhere you turn, there are protein shakes, containers of carrot and mango juice, oranges, tomatoes, and Lord-knows-what made out of tofu.
“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.”
Even Sidi, the wild black dog, has a prized possession or two in the wilderness of boxes and CDs and photos. Cameron Crowe has awarded the pup with a small framed Elizabethtown poster and signed it, “Try to eat smaller portions.”
Walking 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.”
It 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 “Sidi-proofed.”
“They had to put a sheet of plastic on the floor!” she says, laughing. “That dog just doesn’t care. And Orlando’s way of unstressing between takes is to jump around like a 5-year-old or ride on a pint-size scooter, whereas I’m more self-critical. 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.
Elizabethtown is vintage Cameron Crowe: dead center in the crosshatch between comedy and drama. It opens with Bloom’s character experiencing a professional failure—more accurately, as his character narrates, a fiasco—of staggering proportions. A shoe he has designed for an Oregon-based 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 self-loathing, 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, NASA-scale 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.”
Bloom’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— fathers and sons, life and death, hope and regret—through small, subtle encounters.
It’s striking how easily Bloom fits into regular clothing and the twenty-first 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 & Drama—then, 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—but Bloom was cast partly because in real life he actually has broken his back.
Liam 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—but 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.”
From 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?”
And the epic quality is sufficiently rare that, once you’ve proved yourself in the genre, you are sought out again and again—another 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.”
None 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—Jesus!—it was the Dark Ages of my emotional growth,” Neeson says. “I knew ****-all 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.”
The 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—that 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.
“The doctor said he wasn’t sure how severe the spinal-cord 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.
“But there’s something interesting,” he adds very quickly. “I knew I wouldn’t. I knew I wouldn’t, I knew…” He repeats the sentence five times—quick like a stammer, as though he’s still trying to convince himself against hope that this will not be his fate.
The 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 overexertion. “I’d been doing stuff right away,” he recalls, shaking his head. “I went straight back into it, man.”
The 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—with 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.
“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.”
Cameron Crowe, too, sees all of this as key to Bloom’s swift maturation as an actor. “That broken back—that’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 puppy-dog energy, there’s darkness.”
Perhaps 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—a meadowed realm of constancy—even though some of its denizens look wild when viewed from afar.
“My generation in England was exposed to a huge antidrug campaign,” Bloom recalls. “I was one of the kids in school saying, ‘That ****’s not good.’ I’ve still gotten kicks; don’t get me wrong.”
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发表于 2005-10-19 12:36:57
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发表于 2005-10-19 18:26:35
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