Orlando Bloom's still working, just not in Jurassic World

When I saw the character Martin Krebs appear on screen in Jurassic World: Rebirth (review here), I thought "Boy is it nice to see Orlando Bloom on screen again!"

I was never a huge Bloom fan, but I always thought it was strange, and a little unwarranted, that he was unceremoniously ushered out of the spotlight during what should have been the prime of his career. I don't even remember the reason for it. Was he cancelled? Not that I recall. Did he stop being good? Not that I recall there either. 

The guy is only just now 48 years old. It's not like he hasn't been working, it's just that the projects have been almost exclusively what we would have once called "straight to video."

I mean, this was a guy who appeared in two of the iconic trilogies of the early 21st century, those being Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean. At one point, he was among the highest grossing actors of all time in terms of the money made by his movies. Both of those trilogies had other future installments, and Bloom appeared in some of those too.

Then sometime around the end of the Hobbit trilogy, which is now 11 years ago, he just stopped appearing in high-profile movies, with only his appearance in 2017's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales as a reprieve from that. But I don't even think that was a lead role, if memory serves. I believe it was a cameo.

The only problem with all these fond recollections of Orlando Bloom's career is that Jurassic World's Martin Krebs is not actually played by Orlando Bloom. He's played by Rupert Friend, which I didn't realize until the closing credits of Jurassic World: Rebirth. 

Easy mistake to make. I knew the internet would have a good picture of them side by side, so here it is:

Imagine my surprise, then, when the very next movie I would watch would actually feature Orlando Bloom.

That's Deep Cover, a new Amazon Prime movie I first clocked a few weeks back when it was being advertised as coming soon. I noticed Bryce Dallas Howard in it (more on her in a moment) but I didn't pay enough attention to identify her co-stars at the time.

But when Wednesday night rolled around, after I'd seen Jurassic World on Tuesday, that was the logical next movie up for me, and there was Orlando Bloom in the flesh. 

And killing it, to be honest, making me wonder again where he's been all our lives.

The movie has a pretty delightful premise, even if that premise comes to strain credibility a bit. What is the biggest problem faced by undercover cops who are trying to infiltrate a criminal organization? It's being able to stay in character the whole time, adapt to any changes, and supply credible information about their character at a moment's notice, in the highest stakes situations where a misstep could get them killed. There was a whole speech about it in Reservoir Dogs. 

Who best to do this sort of thing, then? How about improv comedians?

Bloom's character is actually coming in to improv as a desperate attempt to keep his career afloat. He envisions himself more as a serious actor, just a serious actor who has been failing to get any work outside of commercials. This leads to much hilarity, especially the way Bloom plays him: deep into the method and forever blind to his own practical limitations as a person who is not actually a gangster.

The whole movie works well overall, with an enjoyable third lead performance by Nick Mohammed of Ted Lasso fame, as the unconfident, stammering member of the trio most likely to lose face and get them killed. 

But let's get to that second lead: Bryce Dallas Howard. Who has also been on my mind this past week.

You may recall that I mentioned Howard also in connection with Jurassic World: Rebirth, when I was contrasting her with Scarlett Johansson in this post, since Johansson was effectively inheriting the lead female role from Howard in the Jurassic movies. I said I liked both actresses but that I respected Johansson while I did not particularly respect Howard. 

Well, lo and behold, Howard reminded me in Deep Cover that I respect her pretty well, too, and she's a lot more than just Ron's daughter. Perhaps I always knew that, but my goal in that post was to boost Johansson, so I had to have a straw man against whom to compare her. 

It's funny that Johansson and Friend would have scenes of pairing up with each other in Jurassic World and Howard and Bloom would have scenes of pairing up with each other in Deep Cover, kind of like alternate universe doppelgangers. 

Oh but we're not done with the actors in Deep Cover in terms of funny proximal viewings.

Two movies before I saw Deep Cover, I saw Heads of State. These are both genre movies, effectively both action comedies, released on Amazon Prime, and they both feature Paddy Considine in a villainous role. That may be the actor's specialty these days, but two in the same week underscored just how much that's the case. 

But wait there's one more, and this is entirely within Deep Cover, and it was surely intentional by the filmmakers. 

I mentioned Bloom's history in the Lord of the Rings movies. You know who else was also in those movies, at least the first one?

Sean Bean, who appears in Deep Cover as their liaison within the police force. 

If I don't use the word "coincidences," does this still count as another post about coincidences? (Oops, I just did.) 

Mr. Right Place, Right Time

Orlando Bloom was a big movie star once.

Or, was it the movies that were big?

Bloom is not so old that he should already be over the hill. He's only 42. But not only is he over it, the hill is not even in his rear view mirror.

He's entered full-on Travolta-Willis territory if the movie I saw advertised at one of the video kiosks who email me is any indication. Not only is this obviously straight-to-video, but The Shanghai Job is the perfect name for a straight-to-video movie.

The thing about Bloom that, superficially, makes such a fall from grace seem kind of shocking is that he once held a pretty impressive record, albeit not one that can be entirely credited to his own talents. The internet is being stubborn about corroborating this for me, but if I'm not mistaken, Bloom's movies had once grossed more than the total grosses of any other working actor.

It makes sense if you think about it. At the time he had this record -- if he had it -- he had appeared in three Pirates of the Caribbean movies and three Lord of the Rings movies. That was enough to launch him ahead of Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, or anyone else you might suspect would boast similar earnings for their movies. (Ford would have surely passed him on the back of the Force Awakens box office haul, and I feel like Samuel L. Jackson is now head and shoulders above everyone else, considering his appearances as Mace Windu and the very small role he had in both of the last two Avengers movies, the second of which is now the highest grossing movie of all time.)

It always seemed strange to me that Bloom was this guy, but I also knew that people -- maybe primarily women -- really liked him. He was a bonafide star, I think, for a while at least.

But he dropped off so quickly and so precipitously that I have to wonder if he ever had it at all, or if he was just lucky that Peter Jackson and Gore Verbinski happened to take a shine to him.

Bloom's six-year "imperial period" -- a term I learned from Slate podcaster Chris Molanphy, regarding a musician's period of creative and commercial dominance -- was pretty spectacular, running from the 2001 opening of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring to the 2007 opening of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. The epics Troy and Kingdom of Heaven also fell in this period.

But after that?

Welp ...

Bloom was of course in two of the next three Peter Jackson Middle Earth movies, starting in 2013. But even by then they almost felt like weird cases of Bloom coming out of semi-retirement. I haven't seen a single film he appeared in from the years 2008 to 2012. That includes missing a movie I might have seen, The Three Musketeers, but the others are truly nothing movies.

After The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies in 2014, it gets even worse. I did see (and like) Joe Swanberg's Digging for Fire in 2015, but I didn't remember that he was in it, and even if I force myself to remember that fact, I get only a vague memory of finding it really weird to see him. He had a cameo in the most recent Pirates movie, but by then he already looked ... old and thick? Would that be uncharitable?

If he just stepped away because he had money coming out of his ears, and wanted to concentrate on a personal life that I remember making the tabloids one too many times, that's fine. People disappear from prominence for all sorts of reasons, and it isn't only because Hollywood chewed them up and spat them out. But showing up in this ... thing above? It renders a different verdict. Only after being spat out do you come back and make The Shanghai Job, which is only called that in the UK and here, I'm learning. Elsewhere (the movie started out in China, it sounds like) it was called S.M.A.R.T. Chase. Which is ... not good.

I've done only a superficial dive into what may have caused this sudden transformation into a pariah, not the deeply researched bit of journalism you should not be accustomed to expecting from me. But at least part of it seems to be a preference for the stage. If he did indeed have money coming out of his ears, a turn to the stage is perfectly respectable, and more power to him.

But when you're in The Shanghai Job, it's a cry for help, isn't it?

It may be that Orlando Bloom knew that he had gamed the system somehow, that he truly was the beneficiary of some luck and the favor of some powerful directors, and that if he were expected to forge his own career after this he'd have a hard time of it.

Maybe he knew that once there was no right place or time, his time was up.