Actor Orlando Bloom was asked to play a small role in the 2013 film The Bling Ring. But Bloom didn’t feel comfortable participating in a movie that was based on the real-life crime.
Why Sofia Coppola made ‘The Bling Ring’
The Bling Ring was directed by filmmaker Sofia Coppola. It featured actors like Emma Watson and Katie Chang playing the teenagers who targeted celebrity homes for a string of robberies between 2008 and 2009. Coppola decided to direct a film based on these real-life events out of fascination for the crimes. Especially since the perpetrators were teenagers.
“When I read the story and learned that they were teenagers I did think about how different it was when I was growing up. We didn’t have reality TV or all those websites or the internet. And just the whole idea that anybody could be famous, and everybody is famous. That whole mentality was so different then,” she once said in an interview with IndieWire.
She was also intrigued by the psychology behind the teenagers responsible for these acts.
“Yeah, I was struck that they thought it was okay to just kind of go in and hang out in these houses and take things. I felt like with Twitter and social media that there are less boundaries and mystique. They felt like they knew these people. They felt like they could just kind of go in there and hang out. Yeah, I think that’s a recent feeling,” she said.
Orlando Bloom refused to do a cameo for ‘The Bling Ring’
Several celebrities would portray fictional version of themselves in The Bling Ring to add to the film’s authenticity. Lindsay Lohan, Leslie Mann, and Paris Hilton made cameos in the feature as celebrities affected by the robberies.
Lords of the Rings star Orlando Bloom was also offered a spot in the feature. But since she was a personal victim of the crimes depicted in The Bling Ring, Bloom declined.
“Sofia Coppola is wonderful and I’d love to work with her. She asked me to cameo in the movie but I said it was too close to home for me to want to be involved,” Bloom once told Hello (via Contact Music).
Bloom disagreed with the film being made in the first place.
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“I thought it was weird to glorify something that was so upsetting for a lot of people. It’s important to detach from material things, but the special, personal things I lost are hard to forget,” he said.
Orlando Bloom went on a spy mission to retrieve the belongings stolen from his home
One of the more valuable items Bloom lost during the robbery was a collection of watches. But in an interview on The Late Late Show, Bloom revealed that he received a tip about someone selling the watches he’d lost. The actor retrieved information on the seller, who turned out to be the owner of a pawn shop. Bloom would later confront the pawn shop owner about his stolen belongings.
“I just rocked up to his shop one day and I wired myself. I had a little microphone,” Bloom said. “I called a private detective! And I said, ‘What do I do?’ And he said, ‘Just get one of those little voice recorders. Get one of these and do it.’ And I was like, ‘Okay.’”
Bloom would pay the pawn shop owner a visit. The owner was more than a little unnerved to see the star.
“I was like, ‘Listen, no police, but I’d like to get my watches back,’” Bloom said. “He’s like, ‘I’ve gotta go around. I’ve gotta rough some people up.’ There’s this whole story… I said, ‘Well, let’s go! Let’s go! I’ll rough some people up!’”
Bloom eventually left the pawn shop, but the owner would call Bloom back so the actor could be reunited with his watches.
“On the table in his office is a box. I open it and I just started to cry,” he said. “That market is so peculiar. Like, how do you offload the kinds of watches I had collected? It was very challenging. I got ’em back and that was that.”
He also joked that a film about him tracking down his watches would’ve made a better film than Coppola’s The Bling Ring.
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