Finding room to Bloom

Being holed up in a broom cupboard-sized office with Hollywood A-lister Orlando Bloom would undoubtedly tick many girls' fantasy boxes. Normally sane colleagues had been reduced to giggling puddles of mush by the mere idea of meeting him; shamefully, I'd spent about three hours beforehand trying to decide what to wear.

The man himself, though, looks far from happy. In the slightly scruffy surroundings of the National Youth Theatre rehearsal rooms, he shifts restlessly in his chair, looking anywhere but at me with those big brown, heart-throb eyes, and his conversation is peppered with pauses, erms, sentences that trail into nothing and endless y'knows.

In fact, when our time is up, he gasps as if he's been underwater, and says 'We're done, aren't we?' with barely suppressed glee and punches the air - which he does then have the good manners to dissemble into a big stretch.

Truth is, Bloom isn't giving many interviews for his latest project; maybe because he's already a long way outside his comfort zone. After a remarkable cinematic career that has seen him star in five of the 15 top-grossing movies of all time before the age of 30, this quietly earnest Kent lad is going back to basics and making his professional stage debut.

It's been nearly ten years since Bloom trod the boards - and even then his amateur stage experience in his final year at Guildhall was somewhat limited, as he was recovering from the small matter of breaking his back.

'Doing all these big movies, there's not the same skill set needed,' he agrees, when I suggest maybe his acting capabilities haven't exactly been tested by the Lord Of The Rings and Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogies.

'Certainly my sword routine was being tested,' he grins.

'Theatre acting is just a different muscle, and I'm sort of shocking it into life. Right now, I'm finding the rehearsal space where we're working a very intimidating place, much more so than any $300million movie set.'

His latest role is indeed a long way away from Legolas and Will Turner. For David Storey's wrenching 1969 play In Celebration, directed by Anna Mackmin, he plays Steven, the youngest of three brothers from a Yorkshire mining family who have all been traumatised in different ways by being educated out of their social class.

When they reunite for their parents' ruby wedding anniversary, the brothers' festering resentments and misery explode. It's a perfect encapsulation of Philip Larkin's famous condemnation of parental good intentions.

'I'm shocked to say I didn't really know the play,' Bloom admits. 'At drama school, you do Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard, all the greats, and I mention those three because I think that David Storey as a playwright has a lot of those qualities: there's a lot of subtext and so many layers.'