The Big Picture

Collider’s Steve Weintraub talks with Orlando Bloom about his three-episode docuseries on Peacock,
Orlando Bloom: To the Edge
.
Pushing physical and mental limits, Bloom explores self-discovery through extreme sports with the aid of professionals, his family, and Buddhist practices.
Bloom discusses his willingness to tackle impossible things, says nothing is off the table now, and talks future projects like
Deep Cover
, A24’s
Wizards!
, and more.

“I felt about as close to death as I could possibly get,” Orlando Bloom says in the trailer for his new Peacock series, Orlando Bloom: To the Edge. In this conversation with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, the actor-producer elaborates, sharing harrowing tales from the three-episode docuseries, with episodes aptly titled “The Emotional Edge,” “The Mental Edge,” and “The Physical Edge.” Each one offers a glimpse into the exploration of self-discovery Bloom navigated while working with experts in the fields of some of our most extreme sports: rock climbing, wingsuiting, and free diving.

Everyone knows Bloom from his roles in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy or the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, but To the Edge is an entirely new look at the actor as he tackles impossible things with the help of trained professionals, his family, and Buddhist practices. During his conversation, Bloom admits there isn’t much he isn’t willing to do after filming for the series, and that there are other extreme activities — like cage-free swimming with great whites or scaling Mount Everest — that just didn’t make the cut for one reason or another.

Check out the full interview in the transcript below for more on To the Edge and Bloom’s future projects, like crime comedy Deep Cover with Bryce Dallas Howard (Jurassic World Dominion), Sean Ellis’ (Anthropoid) The Cut, which he’s producing, David Michôd’s Wizards!, and more.

Orlando Bloom: To the Edge (2024) Follows Bloom on a journey of self-discovery, pushing his physical and mental limits to reach his personal edge of what is possible.Release Date April 18, 2024 Main Genre Reality Seasons 1 Directors Kirk Fraser

COLLIDER: I watched all three episodes, and I was very nervous while I was watching for you, even though I knew you were gonna be okay.

ORLANDO BLOOM: I was very nervous, trust me. I didn’t know I was gonna be okay. Obviously, I am okay, here I am talking to you, but there were times when I definitely didn’t know. I mean, particularly with something like wingsuiting where things can go south very quickly, and you’ve got a moment of seconds to figure things out before you have to pull your chute at a certain altitude. So, that was pretty terrifying, but fortunately I had Luke Aikins as my teacher on wingsuiting. He taught me and put me through the protocols necessary to handle some pretty extreme moments that you see in the show.

Image via Peacock

Listen, I never could have done anything that you did.

Did Orlando Bloom Jump Out of Planes for Tom Cruise? Maybe.

So I have to start with the most important question, and this is a true or false. Is it true that you did this series purely to send it to Tom Cruise as an audition for a Mission: Impossible role, or just to work with him on a stunt in the future?

BLOOM: True. All true. I love Tom. That guy knows how to do some stunts. He’s also a really great human, by the way. He was the producer on Elizabethtown that I did years ago. But I’d love to work with him, so I’ll say true to that.

Exactly.

BLOOM: Even if it’s not.

No, I totally get it. But you know something, with something like this, people are gonna see it, casting directors, Tom could end up seeing it. It could lead to something, you really never know.

BLOOM: Tom knows how to get a hold of me.

You’ve done a lot of cool stuff in your career but there’s gonna be people out there that have never seen anything you’ve done. For people that have never seen anything, what’s the first thing you’d like them watching and why?

BLOOM: I just produced and starred in this tiny little movie called The Cut, which is a film that I did a huge, crazy body transformation for. I went from 185 to 150 pounds. It’s about making weight. I love the boxing movie world, but this is a movie that focuses on the making weight, so the fight is not the physical fight, the fight is the battle to lose weight, which I thought was a unique take on that kind of thing. We’re getting it ready for film festivals, so we’ll see. I’d like people to see that, quite frankly. Of course, there are a few little titles in my history that I’m very proud of and grateful for, but that’s what I’m gonna say for now.

Related Orlando Bloom to Star in and Produce Boxing Thriller ‘The Cut’ Sean Ellis will direct the film which is expected to begin filming this summer.

Yeah, I’m a fan of Sean Ellis. I know the film you’re talking about, and I would imagine Toronto or later this year is when I might see it.

BLOOM: Yeah. Toronto or Venice, or something like that. Hopefully, we’ll be ready. We were literally getting it ready. Sean’s a great director. It’s a really unique story. A really unique story and film, so I’m really proud of it.

The show shows what you’re willing to do, and I’m just curious, have you ever been offered something where you were like, “This is even too dangerous for me?”

BLOOM: As a show?

In real life, because you clearly are willing to do freediving and wingsuiting and climbing, and you drive a motorcycle. You’re willing to take risks. So I’m just curious, where’s the line for you?

BLOOM: You know, there was a time when I considered Everest, but then I feel like Everest became– I don’t know. It’s heartbreaking to see the amount of traffic footfall on that mountain. I remember talking to Laird Hamilton, who I spent a lot of time with a few years back doing his pool training, and he’s somebody I consider a very good friend and mentor in some ways. He’s such an interesting, cool guy, the big wave surfer, Laird Hamilton. He said, “Well, I feel like everybody’s done Everest now.” At the same time, we considered doing great whites out of the cage, but actually, there’s so much footage around that now, around people with sharks and things like that. As we’re learning and growing and understanding that sharks aren’t necessarily like Jaws, which kind of ruined my experience of swimming in the water. [Laughs] But there’s not really. I don’t know. I don’t have an answer, sorry.

Image via Peacock

Have you actually kept up with any of these things that you did for the series?

BLOOM: That’s a really good question. The series we shot a little while ago now. We had to wait for an actors’ strike and things like that to be able to promote. So, the answer is, honestly, I have not had the opportunity. I did do some free diving when I was away. But the thing that I realized is that these are lifestyle choices. The 15 seconds that you see me do something super extreme there, or you see on a social media platform, are experts. I’m not in this instance; I’m saying when you see those, they are experts who have spent maybe years, months, weeks, hours perfecting something to show you, safely, what can be done in a remarkable way, right? I think that our concept of what’s possible and impossible is just getting greater and greater as humans evolve and become more capable in crazy aspects of these adventure sports. People can do remarkable things with their body today.

But again, I realized I’d love to go wingsuiting again, but I would have to find the time to go back to skydiving, which I would be able to do — I have my license — but you need to keep touching these things. You can’t just go, “Oh, I haven’t skydived for, like, 12 months. I’m just gonna go up and go.” You need to keep doing these things. These are very dangerous. I wouldn’t recommend anybody just try this at home. It’s very dangerous. It is life or death. Climbing is a wonderful thing. I could go climbing in a climb gym, it’s just, I realized quickly that these, as I said, are lifestyle choices. There’s only a certain amount of time in my life, and I prioritize family first, and health and wellness. I would love to jump again and to wingsuit, and I will find the time for that. But keeping up with some of this is way more complicated than it sounds.

Even if you go to the gym on a regular basis, if you stop for a number of months you can’t hit the same weight level that you were doing. You have to rewind and build back up to it.

BLOOM: Exactly. I think it’s amazing. Climbing is a wonderful way to also keep in shape and stuff, and free diving, also. But you have to dedicate time, and that’s something that sometimes is a little more challenging for me.

Every Episode Was a Mental and Physical Challenge
“Each one of them challenged me in their own unique, painful way.”

You show your emotion and where your headspace is in the three episodes, but what was the moment where you were actually really in your head before doing something, and were you ever at the point of, “I really don’t know if I can do this?”

BLOOM: I would say that there were definitely moments throughout each episode. Each one of them challenged me in their own unique, painful way. Climbing — physically, mentally, emotionally, the challenge of the exposure. There were moments, as I tried to reach this pedicle for staying on a square that’s, like, the size of a pizza box. There were moments that were just super overwhelming. I didn’t know if physically I was gonna be able to climb. There was this particular piece of the ledge that I didn’t feel like I could get my body over, and fortunately my foot held, and my body kicked in and I managed. The moment before I jumped from the plane to wingsuit five miles over the ocean, it was like, “Am I gonna get to the shore?” And free diving, like, “Am I gonna come back up or am I gonna have a blackout underwater? How far can I go before I have to turn around? Will I know, as I get to the top, if I’ve got enough air?” There’s a lot of learning involved in getting to these deep depths. As it is, I got to, like, 37 meters on my fourth day, which is crazy in some ways. And I’d done a lot of breath training going into it.

But I think the overarching thing was trust, observe the protocols, follow the protocols. There are rules in place for reasons, and sometimes we’re all rule-breakers. I definitely consider myself one of those. But actually, when there’s life and death at stake, there’s rules and protocols, and there’s things that you can follow. If you do that, you mitigate the chances of serious injury or death by a large percentage. If you are cavalier and go gung ho into anything, that’s when tragedy can happen. Valuing my life, having gratitude and respecting and appreciating and having value for my life and my process was a big takeaway, too.

Listen, like I said at the beginning, I could never do what you did, so huge props.

Orlando Blooms Shares the “Unusual” Premise of ‘Deep Cover’
Image via Sarah Krick

I definitely have to touch on two other things. I’m a big fan of your fellow castmates of Deep Cover, and I know you shot that. What was it about that project that said, “I want to do it?” And I know what it’s about, but what do you want to tell people about it?

BLOOM: First of all, I love the cast. Wonderful people. Colin Trevorrow, who produces, called me and talked about [it]. The premise is Bryce Dallas Howard is a teacher who’s teaching improvisation classes. Nick Mohammed is a banker who’s looking for confidence, so he comes to the improvisation class, stumbles across it. I am a method actor who’s out of work, like an actor who takes himself too seriously, who’s in an improvisation class and is earnestly overserious. It is a comedy, hopefully funny enough for everybody. Sean Bean, Paddy Considine, Ian McShane all have these kinds of wonderful, scene-stealing cameos.

It’s just a really unusual premise of these three unknown people coming together. It starts off with Sean Bean, who’s this basically crooked cop, as we had come to understand it, saying, “Hey, they sell blocks of cigarettes across the road in London, the black market. Go in and try to buy them, and if you buy them then we’ll nab these people.” But because I’m method, I kind of escalate it. I’m like, “You think we want these soppy…? No. We want the real stuff.” And it suddenly turns into this massive underworld, underground drug chase with these people who have no idea what they’re doing. So the circumstances are set for, hopefully, amusement and laughter. It’s a sort of action-comedy caper, if you like. I thought that the script was excellently executed. And I thought that Tom Kingsley, the director, who’s this great British director who did this show Stath Lets Flats, worked really well with Colin to make this show a great sort of spectacle. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience.

There’s a little bit of video in the series of Wizards!, which is a movie that David [Michôd] and Joel [Edgerton] wrote that I’m really looking forward to. Do you know what the status is of that film, and what can you tease about it, because I’m a huge fan of David’s work?

BLOOM: Yeah, I love David. Really unique style of comedy, great cast, was a really challenging but rewarding shoot. I’m excited to see that. A24 has it for release. I can’t tell you anything more than that.

Orlando Bloom: To the Edge is available to stream only on Peacock.

Watch on Peacock