A day in the life of Orlando Bloom – pass the sick bucket, please

I like to write about the stories that really matter. The ones that shake us. No fluff. So I have little option but to use this column to talk about Orlando Bloom and hazelnut milk, neither of which I want anywhere near me at breakfast.

Unless you’ve been living under a large goji berry, you will have seen that The Sunday Times ran an interview with Bloom, in which he described his normal day. I use the word in the loosest possible sense. It starts at 6.30am with Bloom checking his sleep tracker “to see if I’ve had a good sleep and check my readiness for the day”. This must be something only rich and famous people do. The rest of us really don’t need an app to tell us that we are a) exhausted and b) absolutely not ready for the day.

After checking in on his young daughter, Bloom does 20 minutes of Buddhist chanting, reads “a bit of Buddhism” and then posts about it on Instagram. I love that phrase, “a bit of Buddhism”. It’s so nonspecific – like saying, I read a bit of Christianity – and so prosaic. I clean my teeth, tie my shoelaces, read a bit of Buddhism, and head to the bus stop.

The Instagram thing is revealing, too. Why read a bit of Buddhism if you’re not going to tell your 4.9 million followers about it? Although to be fair, the Dalai Lama (1.8 million followers; must try harder) also enjoys a selfie.

Next for Bloom is green powders, brain octane oil, a collagen powder “for my hair and nails” and… a hike. All this, I should remind you, before 9am. And there was I thinking that one of the joys of lockdown has been setting the alarm for 8.58am and crawling to your desk in your underwear.

Breakfast, for that was not the green powders, is hazelnut milk, cinnamon and vanilla paste, which would probably have Gwyneth Paltrow thinking, “bit weird, mate”.

We don’t get much detail after this – could it possibly be that rich LA folk don’t do all that much? – aside from the fact that Bloom has rediscovered Lego during lockdown. “I build mostly cars and find the methodical nature of creating this little thing makes me feel like I’m achieving something else,” the 44-year-old explains. It’s actually quite reassuring to think of Bloom in his LA mansion with Katy Perry, pushing little coloured bricks together to give his life some meaning.

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It’s easy to mock Bloom’s mindful, “90 per cent plant-based” life and so we really mustn’t pass up the opportunity. The whole interview is just excruciatingly earnest and virtue signalling. I checked the date but it is not, in fact, 1 April.

“I spend a lot of my time dreaming about roles for myself and others – for minorities and women. I’m trying to be a voice for everybody,” he says. And you just think: are you, Orlando? Because – sorry to break this to you – yours is a voice almost none of us will recognise. Most people don’t have goji berries in the fridge (gone-off berries, maybe) or time to hike before work or scripts to read. We have coffee and booze and bags under our eyes.

“Time is so precious,” bleats Bloom, but he seems to have an awful lot of it on his hands. Who else has time to gaze at a cow and think, “that’s the most beautiful thing ever”, as Bloom apparently does?

We have always suspected that, for all their protestations to the contrary, famous people don’t get it – and now we know for sure. “I will cook at times but otherwise there’s a team of people,” says Bloom. This is lockdown – and Buddhism – LA-style and it is, to be frank, about as welcome as a cup of cold brain octane oil.

Yours,

Rupert Hawksley

Senior commissioning editor, Voices