Orlando Bloom went to extreme lengths to get into fighting shape for The Cut.

The actor stars in director Sean Ellis’ dark, psychological boxing drama as the unnamed Boxer who has one last shot at glory in a title fight. The catch? He has to lose about 30 pounds in a week to “make weight,” a.k.a. to qualify for the fight. The down-on-his-luck Irishman will stop at nothing to shed the pounds in increasingly dangerous and unhealthy ways, to the worry of his partner Caitlin (Caitriona Balfe) and the glee of his new, sadistic trainer Box (John Turturro).

Much like his character, Bloom also had to go through an intense physical transformation to play Boxer onscreen. “We shot in reverse chronological order — I was at my lightest at the beginning of filming and my brain was dead,” he tells Entertainment Weekly at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. “My body was shutting down. It was a very real experience… I can’t compare it to anything.”

The actor adds that “it was actually more mentally than physically” difficult preparing to play the role. “Because I wasn’t really sleeping — when you’re not eating, it’s really hard to sleep,” he says. “I had about three weeks in the U.K. to really kind of tighten the weight loss down and that was wild. I dropped like 10 pounds one night after doing [what] the nutritionist told me.”

Bloom worked with “this amazing nutritionist who works in the industry and worked with Christian Bale,” and that helped him in the final hours.

“He had me on this really tight, strict regime and program for eating, and I was holding at about 163 pounds for what felt like weeks,” he says. “And I’d been doing cardio, everything that the boxers [do]. Then I did this epsom salt bath and he said drink two liters of water, go to bed, and I woke up in the morning and I was like 10 pounds lighter. I was like, ‘Wait, what is this? Osmosis? How do you do this?’”

He laughs as he remembers the shock he felt that morning. “Literally, I have a photograph of me standing on the scale and I sent it to my partner and my friends who are tracking my progress,” he says. “It was wild.”

But he quickly adds a warning to anyone thinking of replicating his process to lose weight on their own. “By the way, don’t try this at home,” he says. “I feel like there’s going to be a rush on epsom salt, because everyone’s so desperate… but it’s not. It was wild. I literally had somebody carrying me out of the bath. I laid down in bed and I had to drink two liters. I think it’s like the water goes back in to release everything. It was like a science experiment. It is a science.”

As Bloom reflects on what it took to make The Cut, he admits the entire process was “really challenging because Boxer’s process is so dark.”

“His backstory is so deep, fraught, and you can see that in some of the flashbacks,” he adds. “And even if you didn’t have the flashbacks, [prosthetic makeup designer] Mark Coulier did an amazing job of breaking my face. I think Sean called him up and he goes, ‘So I’m going to work with Orlando Bloom and we want to break his face,’ and he goes, ‘Ooh, fun.’”

Bloom jokes that he even considered going method to portray some of the physical consequences of Boxer’s history of injuries. “We were talking about the teeth and plumpers and ways to do things in the mouth, then break the nose — not to break the nose, but I’m like, ‘Surely we don’t have to break my nose, but do we? I’m even considering!’” Bloom says with a laugh. “But it was more like we found this amazing prosthetic and things.”

The entire physical transformation ended up impacting Bloom’s performance in ways he didn’t expect. “I was so calorie-depleted going into it and dehydrated,” he says. “We went into the weigh-in and stuff at the end of the movie and I was hardly there, which is sort of perfect in some ways, but I’d be lying down between takes just to kind of conserve energy. And the dehydration. But what it does to the psyche is way more interesting.”

He adds that the film is “more of a character study on what a human and an athlete will put themselves through.”

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“For what?” Bloom says. “To make weight, to do this, to fight, to have that moment, to have that feeling of that desire for greatness — or to be hit. There’s so much more — I was very aware that whether it’s mental abuse, physical abuse, the things that you see that the characters survived, it gives you an insight, and I think there are so many people that [have] unspoken [issues with] body dysmorphia.”

He continues, “We look at a social media channel and we go, ‘Oh, well, we’re supposed to look like this, right? What does it take to get that way?’ And of course, Boxer is a boxer, therefore it’s okay? But it was the shame of the character’s past that plays into the drive and the desire to put everything on the line. It was a very interesting way to look at a fresh take on a boxing movie, that we didn’t focus on the fight as the result. We focused on the fight of making weight, and looking at the psyche and the preparation of a character I thought was a fresh take.”

The film had its world premiere at TIFF on Thursday night, and one audience member had an extremely visceral response. “Somebody passed out in the screening, so that’s the shock value,” Bloom says. “Apparently they came around in the ambulance and they were okay. But it was like, ‘Wait, what?’ They were really into it. They were really feeling it. They were really going there, which I felt too, like PTSD.”

With additional reporting by Gerrad Hall.