Orlando gave it to the journalist Sophie Heawood and it is on The Times issue of September 18th. Miss Heawood took this interview by phone with Orlando on September 3th, when he was in LA.
It’s not usually easy to get access to stars but the British actor Orlando Bloom is on the phone to me from his house in Hollywood, despite being in the middle of preparing for The Three Musketeers and helping a friend to organise his wedding. “I’m the best man. It’s so important to get it right, especially if you haven’t even met the bride’s parents. I’ve been looking up speeches online, everything. I think I’m on top of it now; well, now that I’ve cut the swearing out.”
Bloom, 33, got married himself in July, to the model Miranda Kerr, who he had been dating for three years and who is expecting their first child in January. “We decided to elope. It was the most romantic thing — a bit spur-of-the-moment, but so great, so lovely, just the perfect fit for us. The wedding was something we were planning, but when we got to the location we were thinking of doing it in, which was a private island in the Caribbean, we ended up thinking, why would we wait? Why don’t we just do it now? Our families and friends are spread so dramatically across the world, from Australia to the UK to America, and I’m going to be working for such a long stretch, that it was, you know ... the way we got to do it was wonderful. It was just us.”
The reason Bloom is eager to talk, however, is not about weddings but because throughout his ascent to fame and fortune he has maintained the most unlikely of friendships with an underground London artist called David Miles, who lives in squats, gets by without money and makes art from rubbish he finds on the street. They’ve been friends since Miles helped a 17-year-old Bloom with his Art A-level back in Kent.
And now, Bloom is ****-a-hoop that, after 15 years of persuasion, Miles has agreed to show his art to the public. “It’s been like pushing a steam train up a hill getting him to do something like this,” Bloom says. “I would always say, David, for f***’s sake, you can’t just live as a creative and an artist unto yourself. It’s lovely to talk like that, but what about putting food on the table? But he doesn’t see the world like that, which is why I’m fortunate to have him as a friend.” Bloom recalls when he was first shooting Pirates of the Caribbean and living in a private bungalow at the Château Marmont, a very glitzy rock’n’roll-style hotel in Hollywood. “I brought David out to stay with me there for two and a half months. The whole bungalow became a studio, with David cutting and collaging and photographing and glueing. I’d come home from shooting and he’d have bought a giant 4ft Barbie doll at the 99 cent store and he’d be destroying it in the most beautiful way possible. This was at the time when Paris Hilton was big, and so the doll — well, David absorbed his environment. He’d hang out beside the pool with all these people and make art about it. When he wasn’t hanging his washing out and riding on the bus.”
I speak to Miles about those château days. “Ah yes, that was a piece called Love on the Outside, and it was a rather gruesome walking doll. Two pieces in the exhibition were completed there at the château, with Orlando.”
The exhibition is titled Because You’re Worthless, a play on the L’Oréal slogan, and is the first in a series called London, Paris, New York, Beverly Hills. It’s a far cry from the Kent house clearances Miles grew up going to with his junk dealer father. By the age of 13 he was drawing a picture a day without fail; by 16 he was earning his pocket money painting fakes.
He later created an infamous art squat in Highgate, North London, called Cholmeley Dene, that was featured in World of Interiors. In 1987 he lined the Groucho Club’s function room with thousands of hand-printed A4 sheets, refusing to let what he calls the “money people” buy anything, and instead of having an opening, celebrating the event with a closing instead. He also had one proper exhibition of his work, in 1985, “and I did all the right things and it was very successful, but it left me very unhappy. So I decided I would eliminate money and status, all of that, to find out what being an artist was all about. What is it for? Now I think it’s for transforming things in daily life. It’s not that it replaces money, but imagination and creativity get you a much better exchange rate. If you look around, you’ll see that we are already surrounded by abundance.”
It’s this world view that has provided Bloom with a much-needed counterbalance to his Hollywood success. “Throughout the years, the ups and downs and rounds and rounds of the madness of life that I’ve lived, he’s very much the guy I go to if I have a question about my work,” Bloom says. “At times he’s picked me up on stuff. He makes jokes about ‘the brand’ that he says I’ve become, and asks me why I first got into this. Do I go and do Pirates 4 or do I do five movies that people will probably never see? If I speak to David, he’ll say do five movies that no one will ever see because it will help me to grow. If I speak to anyone else, they’ll say the opposite. So he’s a great moral compass.”
And yet it’s clear that Miles has become very well-connected. He met Oberon Sinclair, now his gallerist, at Courtney Love’s house. The New York artist Tom Sachs is a dear friend. In fact, Sachs helped Bloom to make a piece for the exhibition, too, a wire sculpture of Miles himself.
“My only worry is that after David gets successful I might have to start paying proper prices for his art,” Bloom chuckles. “But you know what? I’d be more than happy to pay any price.”
www.thetimes.co.uk
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