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, played by 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 the 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 shot The Cut in reverse chronological order, meaning Bloom was actually bulking up during production. “Your brain is starved of calories, basically,” Ellis said. “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.
