Orlando Bloom lost almost four stone in just three months to prepare for his new boxing film, The Cut.
Coincidentally, the plot of the Sean Ellis-directed film is also related to a man’s pursuit of weight loss. Bloom’s character in The Cut is on the verge of a breakdown as he attempts to shed weight in time for a major fight, all under the watchful guise of a shady coach (Joh Turturro).
“I basically tiered down the food over a three-month period until just before filming, [when] I was at my lightest. I dropped 52 pounds, and I was about 185 when I started,” Bloom said at Variety‘s Toronto Film Festival Studio. “So I dropped quite a lot of weight, and I was very mentally challenged as well. You feed somebody tuna and cucumber long enough…”
Ellis shot The Cut in reverse chronological, meaning Bloom had to put the weight back on over time.
“Your brain is starved of calories, basically,” explained Ellis. “It was going to be impossible for him to work while dieting. So, he came to us at his lightest, and then he starts to eat. So that meant that we had to shoot the film [with] the ending first and the beginning of the movie at the end. … Over the 25 days that we were shooting, he was putting on the calories. And then it’s edited in reverse.”
Bloom said his radical transformation was more “exciting” than “daunting”, adding: “I was more surprised about the mental aspect of [it], like the sleep deprivation, and not the depleted calories. There’s a lot going on in your brain … living in that headspace for a while was very challenging.”
Some of the scenes in The Cut proved to be a bit intense for the audience at the film festival. The film contains scenes of Bloom draining blood, taking diuretics and manipulating his body before he is weighed.
“Somebody in my row passed out!” Bloom said.
“Yeah, we had a fainter,” added Ellis. “I think we’ve got to put that on the film poster.”
