Orlando Bloom And Sean Ellis Talk About Star’s Transformation Into Past-His-Prime Boxer In ‘The Cut’: “He Was Willing To Have His Nose Broken” – Toronto Film Festival

Damon Wise

September 6, 2024 at 5:30 AM·15 min read

Sean Ellis’s sixth feature, following the deliriously atmospheric 19^th-century vampire movie Eight for Silver (2021), is yet another curveball from the criminally underrated British director. Titled The Cut, it is the story of a past-his-prime boxer who goes behind his wife Caitlin’s back to accept a lucrative comeback fight in Las Vegas. But this is not yet another Rocky-style underdog story, the kind that culminates in the ring. Instead, it is a sometimes-shocking psychological thriller, a sort of boxing procedural that details the extreme lengths that cornered fighters will go to. On paper, it sounds like Southpaw, but in reality, it has a little more in common with this year’s Cannes hit The Substance, a visceral body-horror movie about a fading starlet (Demi Moore) and her desperate drive to maintain her fame.

In The Cut it is actor Orlando Bloom’s turn to defy expectations. As the boxer, the former Pirates of the Caribbean and Lord of the Rings star is a revelation. He’s not entirely unrecognizable as the matinee idol of the 2000s, but, thanks to the magic of prosthetics, he certainly looks like he’s been through the wringer, and his return to professional boxing is not a sure thing. In fact, the most suspense in the film is generated by the initial weigh-in, which will determine whether he even gets to fight in his own title category at all. Caitlin (Caitríona Balfe), his wife and his trainer, can only get him so far, and when the team gets to Vegas, the boxer meets the charismatic Boz (John Turturro). Boz hooks into the boxer’s insecurities, drawing him into an increasingly dangerous training and weight-loss routine.

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With the film about to make its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival, Deadline sat down with Ellis and Bloom to discuss the film and its themes.

DEADLINE: Where did the project start? Who was attached first?

ORLANDO BLOOM: I’d worked with our producer, Mark Lane, some years ago on a movie for Tea Shop Productions. We did a movie together in London called Retaliation, but it was released as The Romans. It was another small, British independent movie production. It was brutal, and I loved the brutality of it. One day Mark said, “I’ve got another one for you,” and he pitched me The Cut. We talked about it, and I loved it immediately. I loved the idea — the premise of a boxing movie without the boxing, where the focus of the fight wasn’t the boxing match itself but rather the fight within the character, who just happened to be a boxer. I thought that was really fascinating, an interesting commentary on the way masculinity operates within that space.

We worked on the script for about a year or two with [screenwriter] Justin Bull, who was fantastic. And then we were just over the moon when Sean read it and responded to it exactly as you’d hope a director with his kind of vision would. He said, “Yeah, I see this.” [To Sean.] Right, Sean? That’s the long and short of it, isn’t it?

SEAN ELLIS: Yeah, that was pretty much it. The first time I read it, actually, was over the Christmas period [in 2022]. Mark had sent it to me, and I was interested because I’d been looking to do a boxing movie. But how do you do a boxing movie? I mean, it’s become almost a genre in itself. They’ve become so clichéd. Like submarine movies: You’ve got to have a scene with one person trapping themself in the air lock and drowning, as they tap away at the little porthole.

With boxing, you’ve got to have an impossible match that they’re not going to win, and then they either do or they don’t. And I thought The Cut was just a really interesting take on that. It was the about the preparation that an athlete goes through, and the drama of that. I thought that was so much more interesting than anything we’ve already seen in a boxing movie. I called Mark back, and I said, “It’s great.” I mean, it grabs you and it doesn’t let go. And it really delivers. It doesn’t let you down, and it really takes you right through to the end. And as OB was saying, it’s pretty brutal.

BLOOM: It’s an assault on the senses — which was kind of what it was like for me, physically.

ELLIS: Yeah. But I love cinema like that. I love it when it grabs you and shakes you. I think that’s what cinema should do.

DEADLINE: Orlando, how much did you weigh when you started the process?

BLOOM: I was about 185 pounds. [Laughs.] Sorry to use pounds and not stone!

DEADLINE: Same as the character?

BLOOM: Give or take.

DEADLINE: How did you lose the weight?

BLOOM: We worked with a great nutritionist called Philip Goglia. He started me on a program about three months prior to filming, and I tiered down from there. I was eating more food than I’d expected, in order to maintain the muscle but drop the weight. There was a sort of science to how much and how often I was eating, like having a spoonful of honey at night, things like that, to hold the muscle but lose the fat. This was three months prior to filming, so when I landed in London to start — which was about three and a half weeks before filming started — I would say I weighed about 170 pounds. I’d dropped quite a lot of weight before I came to the UK, and then in that three-week period I was basically eating five tiny meals a day. A lot of it was tuna and cucumber, and nothing else. I dropped to 152 pounds for the weigh-in scene. We shot that at the beginning of the movie, and then we shot the whole movie backwards.

DEADLINE: Why was that?

BLOOM: Philip, the nutritionist was like, “He’s not going to have any brain function or energy to make the movie.” [Laughs.] He said, “You’ve got to start with the weight loss and then feed him through the movie.” So, we shot the movie in reverse. I remember, I had this massive drop [in weight], because I was sitting at about 163 pounds for what felt like forever. And the training regime was a lot. It was two hours of cardio every day, an hour in the morning and again at night, and then boxing, and then weights, and a very limited amount of food.

I’d already started training — I’d been doing boxing training in America before I came over — and then I dropped 10 pounds of water weight in one night, which was crazy. Philip had told me about this routine that boxers do — they have a hot Epsom-salt bath. I don’t know whether it’s down to osmosis or just some weird body science, but it worked. I had a photo of myself, and I sent it to my partner and my mates, who were tracking me through this wild experience. I sent it to Sean. And then I sat in this space of that weight for about two and a half weeks before we started filming. [Pause] Is that right, Sean? I have to say, my brain is very scrambled…

ELLIS: Yeah, he came to us at his lightest weight because you can’t lose weight and work. It’s almost impossible — you can’t remember your lines or anything else. So, Phil said, “He has to come to you at his lightest, and then you need to allow him to start eating again. But that means you have to shoot the movie in reverse chronological order.” Now, chronological order is a nightmare at the best of times. But reverse chronological order is a total Rubik’s cube. We only had 25 shooting days, and, obviously, Orlando was putting weight on as we were reaching the end of the shoot, which was actually the beginning of the film. But when you edit it in reverse, he starts off heavy and then goes to his lightest point. It was a big jigsaw puzzle, but we got there.

DEADLINE: How did you feel about him losing all that weight? Did you ever feel guilty?

ELLIS: Mark Lane said, “Look, he’s really committed to this. Have a call with him and see if you guys jell,” and I did, instantly. But more than that, what I saw in OB was a huge commitment to make this right. And he was willing to do anything. I think at one point we even spoke about him going to the dentist and having his teeth filed and recapped. There was also the idea that he was willing to have his nose broken. [Laughs.] I was like, “I’m not sure we have to go that far.” But Orlando’s a good-looking bloke, and we were thinking, “How do we convince the world that he’s a professional boxer and make him look like a professional boxer?”

[British makeup artist] Mark Coulier came in and did a lot of work on his face. Mark got an Oscar nomination for Elvis. I’ve worked with him on a couple of movies and he’s just amazing. He took a head-sculpt of Orlando and then showed us what he would be able to do with him. A broken nose; fake ears that were more like cauliflower ears from the fighting; a change of the jawline — there were these “plumpers” that went into his mouth — and the teeth. The eyes as well: Mark gave him a droopy boxer’s eyelid.

I remember when I saw him sitting in the makeup chair. He had the haircut and everything, and I thought, “I buy this guy as a professional fighter.” At that point, he didn’t actually look like Orlando, strangely enough. In fact, I remember when we were shooting, there were two girls in the hotel we were using — just were members of the public — and they were waiting for the elevator to go down. Orlando was down the other end of the corridor, in his pants, and one of them nudged the other one. She whispered, “That’s Orlando Bloom.” The other one looked up and said, “Nah,” and then they got in the lift. I was laughing, because they didn’t recognize him.

DEADLINE: Were you surprised by his dedication?

ELLIS: Even from that first call with him, it was obvious that he was just so committed to this film and was willing to immerse himself. We were referencing [Irish featherweight and lightweight champion] Conor McGregor for a while, to the point where we started talking about the character being Irish, and we loved that idea. Then we cast Caitríona [Balfe], who’s Irish as well, and it made even more sense. It felt like the journey from Ireland to Vegas was bigger, because in the original script he was American, I think. Those changes came about from just me and Orlando talking about the character. I love his accent in it. Honestly, he’s not giving us an Orlando that we’ve seen before, and I love that. I love the change.

DEADLINE: Why did you want Caitríona?

ELLIS: I’d seen her in a couple of movies, Belfast and Ford v Ferrari, and her TV show Outlander. And at the point when we were having these discussions about Orlando playing Irish, I was like, “Well, let’s find an Irish actress.” So, I spoke to Jamie Dornan about Caitríona, because he’d worked with her on Belfast, and I said, “What’s she like? Is she nice? I love her movies. Is she good to work with?” And he was like, “Oh, she’s the best.” So, I got that endorsement, we offered it to her, and, luckily, she said yes. [To Bloom] It was just the three of us a lot of the time, wasn’t it?

DEADLINE: How did her casting affect the script?

ELLIS: A lot of her character was really born out of a lot of the discussions that the three of us had about the relationship that the two characters had. How their past dictated their relationship, and how it was going to dictate their future. So, it was really lovely just to work with both Orlando and Caitríona on finding those characters and really giving them life without really having to spell it out. Boz has more of a visual background, because you see him in flashbacks, but what I love about Caitríona’s character is that there’s a lot of subtext in her performance. It’s not overwritten, but you still get a sense of her life and what’s happened to her in the past.

BLOOM: I remember a conversation I had with her when we first spoke. I called her up. In the early drafts, the script was really centered on this transformation that the boxer goes through, the inner torment and the fight. And I said to Caitríona, “Look at the script as a blueprint, because there’s so much more between the lines than there is in the lines.” I really wanted the authenticity of this relationship to play. Because I think he can’t live without her. He can’t function, he can’t operate without her.

DEADLINE: In the middle of these two you have John Turturro as his trainer, Boz. It’s a very interesting part, almost like a kind of sadistic Jiminy Cricket…

ELLIS: We had many conversations about the script before John actually came on board, but I think John wanted to reassure himself that he was right about how he was going to do it. Because when John turned up — am I right, OB? — he’d fully formed that character. You said, “Action,” and John just did it. There was no, “What do you think?” He’d decided how Boz was going to be.

BLOOM: Can I jump in, Sean? What was on the page for that character was completely different to what John brought to the film. I remember sitting next to him in the makeup chair, and I was in and out of consciousness, in terms of how I felt emotionally. I was paranoid as hell. It was a really weird time, because of my mental state: I wasn’t having any food. Or sleep. I wasn’t sleeping because you don’t sleep when you’re not eating — you keep waking up.

And then he said to me, “It’s love.” And I was like, “What?” He said, “It’s a love story.” And my mind exploded. Sean was like, “Yeah, of course it’s a love story.” But his part wasn’t really written like that. He was written as a pretty straightforward character, like a drill sergeant, very aggressive. And then when he told me that, it became this love triangle in my mind. Boz was seducing me, in a way, into his web. Like, “You’re my guy now.”

Obviously, I’ve been huge fan of the man and the actor for years, and everything he’s ever done. That part could have been so generic in the hands of anyone else, but he just knew what to do. He was sprinkling magic dust all around us. I think we had that conversation on the second day of filming because we were all a bit thrown to begin with. Do you remember that, Sean? I was, certainly. I was like, “Wait, what’s going on?”

ELLIS: I remember Mark coming up to me and saying, “So, is that how we want Boz to be?” Because Boz was very much on the page as a character like the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket. I remember saying to him, “That’s John Turturro, and he’s giving you Boz. It might not be the Boz you saw on the page, but it is a Boz, and he’s absolutely made it his own.” As OB said, he’s sinister, he’s conniving, and he’s also kind of a groomer, because he understands his victim and he knows how to take control. So, he really pulled himself into this in a very insidious way, which I find very creepy and just brilliantly executed.

BLOOM: Yeah, he totally transformed what the movie could have been.

DEADLINE: You’ve got the Toronto premiere coming up. What kind of reactions are you hoping for?

ELLIS: Well, I hope they don’t throw eggs at the screen. [Laughs.] Listen, I’m incredibly proud of the film and I’m incredibly proud of the performances that the actors have given. It was just such a privilege to record them, and be present, and see them craft those characters. That’s the thing I’m most proud of when I look at it. I think it’s very strong, and it’s a drama with very strong characters.

DEADLINE: Orlando?

BLOOM: Yeah, it’s funny, when I was at drama school, I remember working on The Seagull, the Chekhov play, and there’s a moment at the end where the audience goes silent, because it’s just so uncomfortable. And I think this movie has a similar impact. It’s such an assault on the senses. And, to his credit, Sean never takes his foot off the gas. You can’t hide at any point in this movie. It’s like we strap you into a rocket, and you’re off. And there’s a lot of commentary on the way athletes — male athletes in particular — operate. Obviously we haven’t taken this from a true story, it’s fictitious. But I think it deals with very real ideas about self-worth. It’s about what people will do to fill the void that’s in their stomach, or in their soul. It’s about the lengths they will go to.

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Orlando Bloom And Sean Ellis Talk About Star’s Transformation Into Past-His-Prime Boxer In ‘The Cut’: “He Was Willing To Have His Nose Broken” – Toronto Film Festival