LOS ANGELES — Can a bunch of rowdy pirates slay a corn-fed superhero?
Real-life lovers Orlando Bloom and Kate Bosworth are not really in a contest to see who has the biggest hit of the summer, according to Bloom. But it is still intriguing to see which one of them will come out on top.
Superman Returns opened last week, generating a five-day, $84 million box-office bonanza with Brandon Routh as the Man of Steel and Bosworth as his Lois Lane.
On Friday, Bloom’s modest little adventure flick, Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, is preparing to blow the doors off a few thousand theatres across North America. The original Pirates movie made $654 million worldwide in 2003.
“I’m so proud of her!” Bloom enthuses about Bosworth when the well-received Superman movie is mentioned. The Pirates sequel Dead Man’s Chest should be just as good, he says, adding that it is crucial that all summer blockbusters excite audiences.
“If people have an expectation and it doesn’t deliver, that’s when people start to worry. People go: ‘The audience is losing faith in the industry. They’re just going to go buy DVDs because the movie experience isn’t the same!’ I want every movie to be a huge success because, that way, it excites people to want to keep going to the movies. It gives me a job.”
The 29-year-old, Canterbury-born Englishman’s job in Dead Man’s Chest is to reprise his role as Will Turner. Will is the prissy son-of-a-pirate who makes the finest swords, brandishes them with skill and then runs off with the sexy heroine played by Keira Knightley, thus turning them both into outlaws.
In the sequel, the adventure continues by picking up loose story threads from the original, including a subplot involving Turner’s undead pirate daddy, who is now shipmates with scary Davy Jones. The action sequences for both sequels were shot last year on location in the Caribbean. The studio sequences for Pirates 3 will be filmed in L.A. next month.
“It was great to go back,” Bloom says of the sequels. “I think nobody expected us to be making another two films once we had made the first one. Okay, Pirates Of The Caribbean — done — you know what I mean? Then, with the success of it, ‘Let’s do some more!’ ”
Bloom credits the writers, Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott, director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer with creating worthy sequels. They did so by crafting “a story that could evolve, and it did, and it felt very natural, very comfortable. The characters developed. It felt as if they were on a journey.”
Betraying his concerns about the Will Turner of the original, Bloom says that in Dead Man’s Chest his character gets to change for the better.
“Don’t you think he’s a little more pirate-y and a little less of a stick-in-the-mud? I hope you do because that was kind of the intention. And I get a pair of boots instead of those little shoes that I was wearing, with stockings, which weren’t cool at all, in my opinion.”
Besides the pirate boots, which gave Bloom a strut he lacked in The Curse Of The Black Pearl, Will Turner also shows more depth than just being the pretty-boy romantic lead. “There is a dark side to Will,” says Bloom, “that I think evolves a little bit because he starts to assume this pirate thing, you know what I mean?”
Once again, Bloom has good chemistry with Johnny Depp, who is back as the eccentric Captain Jack Sparrow. “He’s really cool and I can be straight,” Bloom says of their on-screen relationship. “He creates, he sets up the moments, and I just play them so straight that it’s just funny. You’re never quite sure if Will is getting it or not ... but that’s what’s funny. Does Will realize that he is being completely bucked with? Or not?”
But the whole movie Dead Man’s Chest bucks with the audience. It suffers from a case of pirate-interruptus, ending with a cliffhanger that will not be resolved until the third movie is released next May.
“I think that’s great,” Bloom says, rejecting concerns that the cliffhanger story will turn viewers off.
“It’s kind of cool because you know there is another whole experience to get involved in. For me, I think it’s awesome. But is it annoying for an audience? I don’t know. You’d have to ask them.”
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