Orlando Bloom Interview
How did playing Legolas Greenleaf change your life? Did you get a tattoo? You do a lot of stunts and sustain a lot of damage in real life.
What's Liv like?
You did a lot of surfing in between filming right?
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New Zealand is so green and healthy and outdoorsy and stuff so I started putting little tests on myself, like in terms of getting fit and using the environment around me. I used to go swimming quite a lot when I was there and I stopped drinking caffeine too because we were doing nine weeks of night shoots and I came in at 6 and was out on set by 11 or 12. Before I went on, I had two huge espressos in the make-up bus and I got up on set and I was gung ho. I'm not a big coffe drinker anyway so I was firing on all cylinders and when I went to see the rushes I was like 'Whoa!'. I was like, 'No more coffee!!' and started becoming more elvin, drinking herbal tea with lemon. I tried to stop smoking. I didn't go as far as eating nuts and berries which is what Viggo accused me of!
I've got a small sun on my belly. I got it when I was about 15. I told my parents it was one of those tattoos that only last five years or some ridiculous things like that.
I broke my leg on my motorbike when I was riding around in London. I realised when I came off the motorbike I was probably not safe on the roads. I just move a bit too quickly through life - at least I did. I broke my back too and that really stopped me. I fell three floors out of a window trying to get onto a roof. I used to do things impulsively. I'm the sort of person that will go off and do something on a whim and then just deal with the consequences later. Breaking your leg is one thing, I've broken both those and my arm, my wrist, my nose and all sorts of things and numerous other inujuries through sport and snowboarding and stuff like that, but breaking your back is a different thing. I didn't think I was going to get through that one but I did. I was in a wheelchair for four days when they told me I'd never walk again. A neuroscan revealed I crushed my vertebrae and bruised my spinal cord. And then two years later I was playing one of the most physical characters in the Lord of the Rings which is surreal.
I broke my rib when I fell off a horse during filming. We were doing this shot where we were going down a gully and had to pull up very quickly. We did it like five times and I kept saying to the person who had all this clobber on on the horse with me, 'Lean back! Lean back!' when we were going down the gully. His weight was pushing foward as the horse just kept wanting to go. The fifth time. the horse was overexcited, and we were tired and we just bailed off to the side when I landed on a rock and he fell on top of me and I cracked my rib!
Liv's a sweetheart. She played and elvin princess and she really is an elvin princess - a lovely, sweet girl. She's great at what she does. She became one of the lads. She came surfing with us once - I don't know if she actually got on board but she was there. She was there with her boyfriend and her sisters and we all became like family.
When we arrived there I thought we needed to do something outside of the movie to keep ourselves sane. I suggested that we get motorbikes but the guys said there was no need to kill ourselves (laughs). Eventually we went out and bought surfboards and we started getting really into it. You can imagine what we looked like, going down to the beach on the first day with our brand spanking new boards just freshly waxed and the water was freezing and all of these surfers just turned around and looked at us giving us filthy looks. We actually got quite good by the end of it. And because a lot of the other guys got boards as well - Billy, Don, Elijah and Sean. Even Viggo had a go at it and we were all first time surfers.
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