Orlando Bloom

How do you remain grounded after being in some of the biggest film franchises of the 21st century? For the industry veteran and issue 30 cover star, the answer is simple: keeping faith, and family, close

Orlando Bloom has a study in his Santa Barbara home that is separated from the rest of the ground floor by drawn curtains. He takes video meetings and phone calls in this study, which also has shelves that are filled with model cars and a carved Gohonzon scroll before which Bloom, a practising Buddhist, offers daily prayers. Aptly, for an actor who made his name playing an expert archer in five The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies between 2001 and 2014, he also has a bow and an arrangement of arrows on top of one of the filing cabinets. But it’s the drawn curtains that give this room its character, constantly letting in the wafted sounds of dogs yapping and children playing from elsewhere in the house.

His 18-month-old daughter is obsessed with this curtain, Bloom explains, as he’s chatting to Port over Zoom one day in early spring. One of her favourite things is to push her face through the hangings and surprise her dad while he’s working (maybe reading scripts for his Amazon show, Carnival Row, which has just filmed a second series, or planning field trips with Unicef, with whom he has collaborated since 2007). Here she comes now, his little girl, distracting Bloom mid-sentence, so that he abandons what he’s saying, grins, and speaks in the exaggerated and unselfconscious way of besotted dads everywhere: “Oh-h-h-h… What are you doing? Oh-h-h-h.”

“What were we just talking about?” he asks, turning back to our conversation.

How parenthood changes a person?

“Oh yeah!” says Bloom. He’s wearing a white t-shirt today; his dark hair is oiled and messy. A rapid and enthusiast talker, “a glass-half-full guy”, he’s maybe a little extra upbeat today thanks to a flask of strong coffee that he sips from at intervals. “I think having kids has a massive impact on your processes as an adult. Certainly has on mine. You’re not the most important person in the room anymore. You’re not even the most important person in your own head.”

Bloom had his daughter with his partner of several years, the American popstar Katy Perry. He also co-parents an 11-year-old son from a previous marriage, to the Australian model Miranda Kerr. How has he found these dual-track experiences of fatherhood, a decade apart?

“Even though I was 30 when I had my son, I feel like I was very young,” he says. “I remember I wanted to be there for every ‘first’: first this, first that, first time he went down a slide. If I missed a first I was livid.” He can see with some experience that those firsts are no more important than seconds, thirds, hundredths. The whole journey is to be appreciated. Now, “there’s less anxiety attached to the parenting process,” he finds. “More joy. More appreciation.”

Something similar has been at work when it comes to how Bloom approaches show business in his 40s, he says. “I’m 25 years deep in this industry, now. I can see that it’s all ebbs and flows. I had such a white-hot start that I could look at it and say, ‘What am I doing?’ But I’ve learned that it’s ebbs and flows. And I give myself props, sometimes, just for having stamina. Just for still being in the game.”

He grew up in Canterbury in south-east England, his childhood defined by academic struggles at school (Bloom is dyslexic), a pronounced creative streak (interests in drama, sculpture and photography) and a topsy-turvy grounding in religion. “I was confirmed by the Archbishop of Canterbury,” he says, adding that there was also a countering Jewish influence in his life, which came from his mother Sonia’s husband. At 16, when Bloom moved to London to enrol in a drama programme, eventually ending up as a student at the National Youth Theatre, he came across Buddhism. He hasn’t looked back since.

“There were years when I hardly practised it,” he says, “but the philosophy and the thinking never left me. It’s pretty basic: You do good; you get good.” He’s also found in Buddhism useful lessons about dealing with praise and also dealing with censure. “Both of which you get a lot of, when you work in the public eye… I make tons of mistakes,” Bloom says, shrugging, “all the time. And the practice has helped me to grow from those mistakes. Rather than shaming or guilting myself, I try to tell myself: ‘Well, that happened; it’s done.’ Or, ‘Well done for that!’”

He’s an extreme sports type, anything fast (motorbikes on raceways), anywhere dangerous (paddle boarding with sharks). In a way it’s a surprise he should be so casual with his body: Aged 20, and still at drama school, he fell out of a third-storey window by accident and broke his back. “That was nearly lights-out for me. I was told I was never gonna walk again. Everything felt like a blessing after that.”

For several years, indeed, everything was a blessing, at least in acting terms. Just before he graduated he was cast as the warrior elf Legolas in the original The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He spent months filming in the blissful surrounds of rural New Zealand, still an anonymous figure, and when the movies were drip-released to great acclaim between 2001 and 2003, Bloom became a star. Scattered between these films, he was in two Pirates of the Caribbean movies, enormous money-makers in their own right. “Forget the successes, though, man,” Bloom grins. “Nobody remembers the successes: not really. I do! I want to. But I don’t think other people want to.”

He says this jokily, without bitterness, but the fact remains: Press attention on Bloom has been intense and sometimes harsh. Two blockbusters (Troy, Kingdom of Heaven) followed shortly after The Lord of the Rings, as well as comedy The Calcium Kid and Cameron Crowe’s drama Elizabethtown. “I’m grateful for the path,” Bloom says, looking back over it all. “But there were aspects of it that were unexpected. And unclear.” For years, after a third Pirates movie in 2007, Bloom was seen infrequently. He did some theatre in New York and London. He became a dad. He teamed with Unicef, advocating for children’s rights in Nepal, Sarajevo, Jordan and Niger.

Asked whether his involvement with that charity was a rejection of what came before, or an effort to plot a new course, Bloom says: “Probably a bit of both. I’d been on this crazy train… But there’s a stigma around everything, right?” He means, a derisive reaction to actors who involve themselves with aid work. “It’s like, ‘Who are you to help?’ And that question has repeated in my own mind. ‘Who am I to help?’” In the end, he decided there were a million ways to talk yourself out of doing something helpful. Better to do the helpful thing, he reasoned, and keep doing it. Outlast the sceptics. The day we spoke he was planning a trip to Warsaw with Unicef, then on to Ukraine.

In the early 2010s, Bloom reunited with Peter Jackson to appear in the latter two The Hobbit movies, reprising his role as Legolas in The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies. (Recently, curious, he took those bow and arrows from his study and set up an impromptu archery session with his son in the back garden. “Still got it,” Bloom reports, with relief.) Since 2019, he has headed up the cast of the Amazon TV show, Carnival Row, a parable about refugees set in a world that humans and fairies coinhabit. “I love my job,” he posted on social media, after filming on the show’s second series finished in September.

Does he still love his job, at an age and stage when complacency in any line of work begins its normal creep? “There’s nowhere I’d rather be than on set. And I haven’t become complacent, no,” he says. At the same time, he explains, “I definitely don’t think that I’ve quite landed… Potentially the next decade could be really interesting for me. Far more interesting than my 20s, if I get the right opportunities. I’m a safe bet, I think, because I do everything in my power to make good on an opportunity.”

He glances off at the curtains that separate his study from the rest of the home. The family dogs are making a racket out there. And from some other room there comes the sound of his daughter, shrieking with glee. “I mostly wake up every day with a sense of optimism,” he says. “I think I’m a positive dude. And when you have kids in your life, when you see the joy of them experiencing the world for the first time, it’s a reminder that all the other things get in the way of that.”

Better to come at life with the pleasure of a child, pushing their face through Dad’s big curtains? Bloom smiles. “That’s it,” he says, “that’s it.”

Orlando Bloom wears Zegna SS22 throughout

Photography Ryan James Caruthers

Styling Julie Velut

Grooming Lori Guidroz

Styling assistant Eliza Karpel

Photo assistant Andrew Friendly

Production Arzu Kocman by Productionising

Production assistant Alan Krohn

Location Topanga Creative Acres Location Ranch