Orlando Bloom has opened up about the extreme weight loss he underwent for his latest film.
The British actor plays a boxer in the new film The Cut, directed by Sean Ellis. For the role, he had to undergo a drastic diet to lose 23 kilos.
Explaining how he lost the weight in just three months, Orlando Bloom told Variety: “I basically cut down on my food intake over a three-month period until, right before filming, I was at my lowest weight. I lost 50 pounds, down from about 180 pounds when I started.”
But the impressive weight loss didn’t come without pain and damage. “So I lost a fair bit of weight, and I was also really mentally challenged. You feed someone tuna and cucumber for a long time…” the 47-year-old actor said.
That’s why the actor later warned about the psychological impact of such a diet, saying: “I was more surprised by the mental aspect, like the lack of sleep, than the calorie depletion. There’s a lot going on in your brain… living in that state of mind for a while was very difficult.”
The director also addressed the star’s approach to weight loss, explaining that it affected the filming process. To cope with the actor’s exhaustion, the work schedule had to be disrupted.
“The brain is deprived of energy, basically. It couldn’t work while dieting. So it came to us at its lowest weight, and then it started eating again. That meant we had to shoot the movie from the end up and back to the beginning,” Ellis revealed. “For the 25 days of filming, it was accumulating calories. Then the editing is done in reverse.”
