The actor said he thinks he “blanked” the film out of his brain when asked about one of his lines.
Orlando Bloom struggled to remember one of his lines from the 2004 historical epic “Troy” only to admit that he didn’t want to do the film nor did he want to play the character Paris, Prince of Troy and Hector’s younger brother.
The actor, in a recent interview for Variety’s “Know Their Lines” series, was asked about his “Do you love me, brother? Will you protect me from any enemy?” line from a movie that also stars Brad Pitt, Eric Bana, Diane Kruger and Brian Cox.
“I think I just blanked that movie out of my brain,” said Bloom of one of the highest grossing movies of 2004.
He later continued, “I didn’t want to do the movie, 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.”
He recalled one part of the script where Paris “crawls along the floor” having been beaten by someone before holding his brother’s leg.
“And I was like, ‘I’m not gonna be able to do this.’ And one of my agents at the time said, ‘But that’s the moment that will make it.’ And I completely fell for that line of an agent. I think that’s why I blanked that line from my mind,” he said.
The Wolfgang Petersen-directed film, which scooped up an Academy Award nomination for Best Costume Design, received mixed reviews from critics with a 53% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Bloom hasn’t been the only member of the “Troy” cast to criticize the movie.
Pitt, who starred as Achilles in the movie, told the New York Times back in 2019 that he pulled out of another film so he “had to do something” for the studio ahead of “Troy.”
“It wasn’t painful, but I realized that the way that movie was being told was not how I wanted it to be. I made my own mistakes in it,” said Pitt, who added that it was driving him “crazy” that he couldn’t get out of the “middle of the frame.”
He later added, “It’s no slight on Wolfgang Petersen. ‘Das Boot’ is one of the all-time great films. But somewhere in it, ‘Troy’ became a commercial kind of thing. 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.”
