It cost $200 million to make and featured an all-star cast – but Orlando Bloom isn’t too fond of the role he played in a major Hollywood film.
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The UK actor, 47, starred in a string of buzzy movies throughout the early 2000s, including franchises Pirates of the Caribbean and Lord of the Rings, but there was one big-budget, star-studded film he “didn’t want to do”: 2004’s Troy, co-starring Brad Pitt and Eric Bana.
“I think I just blanked that movie out of my brain,” Bloom told Variety when asked to remember a line from the film.
“I didn’t want to do the movie,” he added, before clarifying, “I didn’t want to play this character.
“The movie was great — it was Brad and it was Eric and it was Peter O’Toole.
“And I was like, ‘How am I gonna play this character?’ It was completely against everything I felt in my being.”
Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom in the 2004 movie Troy.
The actor, who is engaged to US pop star Katy Perry, singled out one scene he was against doing – in which his character Paris is beaten and crawls along the floor before grasping onto the leg of his brother Hector (Bana).
“[My agent told me], ‘That’s the moment that’ll make it’,” Bloom said.
“And I completely fell for that line of an agent. I think that’s why I blanked that line from my mind.”
Despite mixed critical reviews, Troy did well at the international box office, making $US497.4 million against a $US180 million budget.
It was one of the most costly produced movies at the time of its release.
Bloom said he’d “blanked” the movie from his mind.
Meanwhile Pitt, who starred as Greek hero Achilles in the film, previously said he didn’t agree with how the movie was made.
“It wasn’t painful … But I realised that the way the movie was being told was not how I wanted it to be. I made my own mistakes in it,” he told the New York Times in 2019.
Pitt has also aired criticism over the 2004 film.
Pitt continued, “What am I trying to say about Troy? I could not get out of the middle of the frame. It was driving me crazy.
“Every shot was like, ‘here’s the hero!’ There was no mystery.
“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.”
