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Orlando Bloom has revealed he lost 52 pounds in just three months for Sean Ellis’s new boxing drama, The Cut.
The Pirates of the Caribbean star plays a boxer who comes out of retirement to fight for a championship title while undergoing a drastic weight-cutting regimen at the behest of his extreme coach (John 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 told Variety at Toronto International Film Festival where the film premiered on Thursday (September 5).
“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 (Anthropoid) shot The Cut in reverse chronological order, meaning Bloom was actually bulking up during production.
“Your brain is starved of calories, basically,” Ellis said to Bloom. “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 added of the toll the weight loss took on his body: “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.”
The Cut is less about the fighting and more about Bloom’s character’s dramatic weight loss regime, which sees him draining blood before his all-important weigh-in.
“Somebody in my row passed out!” Bloom said of the premiere screening.
The Lord of the Rings star has been engaged to pop singer Katy Perry since 2019.
During an appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast earlier this week, Perry said that she and Bloom regularly attend couples therapy because they want to “evolve” as a couple.
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“That’s why we’re in this relationship – to become better humans so that we can raise this amazing human being,” she said. The couple welcomed their daughter, Daisy Dove, who is now four years old, in 2020.
Perry added that one of her strongest love languages is “acts of service,” which involves doing things for a partner that make their life easier or more enjoyable.
She told host Alex Cooper: “It’s like if I come downstairs and the kitchen is clean, and you’ve done it all, and you’ve done all the dishes, and you’ve closed all the pantry doors, you better be ready to get your d*** sucked! I mean like literally, that is my love language. I don’t need a red ferrari. Just do the f***ing dishes!”
In response, Bloom commented on a clip from the podcast posted on social media, joking: “I’ve cleaned the whole house.”
