Orlando Bloom shares 'extreme' effects losing 30lbs in three months had on him

Orlando Bloom has opened up about some of the ‘extreme’ effects that losing 30 lbs in three months had on him.

With fiction mirroring real life (just perhaps with less of the drama and Irish accents), the actor had to go on a cut of his own when preparing for The Cut.

Starring as The Boxer, the film itself sees a former champion returning to the sport for redemption. But in order to make it to the ring for the big fight, he needs to make weight.

And with the help of sketchy trainer Boz (played by John Turturro), he goes to extreme measures to do so. Reality soon unravels as obsession takes over the boxer, spiralling into a pretty dark place with Bloom’s real-life cut also having some rough consequences.

As the 48-year-old points out to LADbible, the film is ‘called The Cut because, it’s about cutting weight’. So for him, that pretty much meant being ‘hangry the whole time’ while being supervised and monitored by an expert nutritionist.

“Definitely hangry and probably not a lot of fun to be around for the last bit,” he adds. Bloom ended up on a diet of just tuna and cucumber for the last three weeks as he had ‘tapered down from three meals, to two, to one’, cutting out his beloved protein powder and well, everything.

“Towards the end, I didn't have water for about 48 hours, just to kind of really get that dry, crazy look that we ended up with,” he explains, with the boxer almost a shell of a man by the end.

“So that was, that was really intense. Definitely. That was when it started to get wild up there on the old noggin, as we say.”

In the film, the boxer starts to have flashbacks to his childhood, as he starts to hallucinate a conversation with his mother, before fading in and out of consciousness with Boz seeming like he couldn’t care less.

The final scenes when Bloom was at his lightest were filmed first. (Republic Pictures)

While the boxer was really going through it, Bloom’s cut meant he could relate to an extent.

“We’re built to have a balanced diet and sleep – those things that help,” he says. “And when you restrict your body to the extreme that the boxer goes through for the movie – and I did in order to play the role – sleep becomes an issue which then leads to a hanger to an extreme and maybe a little bit of paranoia and dark, weird intrusive thoughts.”

But in truth, Bloom reckons having these dark thoughts ‘helped’ with his performance.

“I just tried to lean into that and use it for the role,” he adds.

Although, let’s just say he didn’t quite give into his intrusive thoughts as his character in the film does (trust me, if you’re squeamish, you’ll want to cover your eyes).

Always wanting to commit fully to a role, Bloom isn’t opposed to doing a big transformation for a film again, despite those ‘intrusive’ consequences.

Although, the Boxer really was pretty ‘drastic’ and the actor isn’t so sure where something so ‘extreme’ would come up again.

The Cut is in cinemas from 5 September.