Orlando Bloom Explains Why Turned Down $12.4 Million Movie Offer Alongside Emma Watson

Actor Orlando Bloom was offered a small role in the 2013 film The Bling Ring, but Bloom refused to be a part of the film as the story felt "too close to home."  The film was directed by Sofia Coppola and featured actors Emma Watson and Katie Chang. Watson and Chang essayed the role of teenage robbers. Coppola decided to direct a film based on these real-life events out of fascination for the crimes. 

“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. 

Celebrities such as 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 Magazine (via Contact Music). Bloom disagreed with the film being made in the first place. “I thought it was weird to glorify something 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.

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 visit the pawnshop owner. 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.