How Orlando Bloom Dropped 52 Pounds to Play a Tortured Boxer

Orlando Bloom spoke to Variety about shedding weight for his upcoming boxing drama The Cut, which premiered last week at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The Cut could be described as a weight-loss thriller, approaching physical fitness from the perspective of a body-horror movie. Bloom stars as a boxer who goes to increasingly drastic lengths to lose weight at the behest of his overbearing coach (John Turturro) before a make-or-break match. The role required the Pirates of the Caribbean star to drop more than 50 pounds in just a few months.

“I basically tiered down the food over a three-month period until just before filming, [when] I was at my lightest,” Bloom explained. “I dropped 52 pounds, and I was about 185 when I started. So I dropped quite a lot of weight, and I was very mentally challenged as well. You feed somebody tuna and cucumber long enough…” the actor trailed off.

Since the film was shot in reverse chronological order, Bloom was then trying to gain weight as the production dragged on. “He came to us at his lightest, and then he starts to eat,” director Sean Ellis clarified. “Over the 25 days that we were shooting, he was putting on the calories. And then it’s edited in reverse.”

But Bloom felt the performance posed an “exciting” opportunity rather than a “daunting” task. “I was more surprised about the mental aspect of [it], like the sleep deprivation, and not the depleted calories,” he said. “There’s a lot going on in your brain,” Bloom added. “Living in that headspace for a while was very challenging.”

The Cut doesn’t yet have a release date, but “audiences looking for a straight-forward boxing movie may be surprised,” Variety noted of the fairly extreme psychodrama. “Somebody in my row passed out!” Bloom bragged of the premiere, while Ellis noted: “Yeah, we had a fainter. I think we’ve got to put that on the film poster.”