Orlando Bloom has spoken out about his role in the 2004 historical epic, Troy. The actor, who starred alongside Brad Pitt and Eric Bana in the film, portrayed Paris, Prince of Troy, a character who he now says went “against everything I felt in my being.”
Bloom made the revelation while being interviewed on Variety‘s Know Their Line‘s video series. When presented with one of his lines from Troy – “Do you love me, brother? Will you protect me from any enemy?” – the actor couldn’t think of the right answer, guessing it was either from one of The Lord of the Rings movies or Kingdom of Heaven (2005).
When he was told it was actually from Troy, Bloom admitted he’d actually blocked the movie from his memory, given his feelings toward it.
“I think I just blanked that movie out of my brain by the way,” he explained. “So many people love that movie, but for me playing that character was just like [slits throat]. Am I allowed to say all these things? I didn’t want to do the movie. I didn’t want to play this character.”
He doesn’t, however, want the public to misconstrue his words as him saying he doesn’t think Troy was a good film. On the contrary, he believes his co-stars performed their roles well. It was just Paris who rubbed him the wrong way.
“The movie is great. It was Brad [Pitt]. It was Eric [Bana] and Peter O’Toole,” he said. “But how am I going to play this character? It was completely against everything I felt in my being.
“At one point it says Paris crawls along the floor having been beaten by somebody and holds his brother’s leg,” he continued. “I was like, ‘I’m not going to be able to do this.’ 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.”
Based on Homer’s epic, Iliad, Troy centers around the Trojan War – the fight between the kingdoms of Sparta and Troy. It stars Brad Pitt as Greek warrior Achilles and Eric Bana as Hector, Crown Prince of Troy, who commanded the Trojan forces and was Paris’ older brother. Diane Kruger, Sean Bean, Brendan Gleeson and Peter O’Toole also starred in the film, which earned $497.4 million at the box office, despite receiving mixed reviews.
Bloom isn’t the only actor to have commented negatively on the film. In a 2019 interview with The New York Times, Pitt said he hadn’t necessarily wanted to accept a role in Troy – he just needed to appear in it because he’d pulled out of another feature.
“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. It wasn’t painful, but I realized that the way that movie being told was not how I wanted it to be,” Pitt revealed. “I made my own mistakes in it.”
He added that this sentiment changed the trajectory of his career, explaining, “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.”
Diane Kruger also spoke about her experiences both on-set and in the lead-up to Troy‘s release, telling attendees at the Zurich Film Festival in 2023, “It was exhilarating, but it was a circus. The sets were huge, paparazzi were flying around in a helicopter, waiting for Brad Pitt, it was crazy!
“When the movie was coming out, the press in Germany was very, very tough on me,” she recalled. “They found my father, whom I haven’t seen since I was 13. They made up stories. It was really harsh.”
More from us: 80 Years After It Crashed, Renewed Search to Begin for Richard Bong’s Missing ‘Marge’
Kruger added that she almost didn’t get the part and that it was director Wolfgang Peterson who’d fought for her.
“The studio didn’t necessarily want to hire me,” she revealed. “It was Wolfgang who fought for me. They thought I was too skinny, whatever. I had to fly to Hollywood for a screen test, they put me in a costume and tried to make me look ’rounder.’ It was just one of these moments when you sit in an office full of older men who look you up and down. It felt like I was being presented in a way that wasn’t me at all.”