One meal a day. No sleep. Losing 60 pounds. How Orlando Bloom pushed himself to the brink for his new film.

If you’re looking for the Orlando Bloom you remember — clean-cut, grinning, Teen People's "sexiest guy ever" — he’s nowhere to be found in his new movie. Instead, the man onscreen is almost unrecognizable: gritty and haunted, a fighter who looks like he’s been to hell and back, because in many ways, he has.

In The Cut, in theaters now, Bloom plays a washed-up boxer chasing a second shot at glory. It's a role that pushed him to his limits, both physically and mentally. To disappear into the character, Bloom lost 60 pounds, surviving on little more than cucumbers and tuna. The extreme transformation left him exhausted, vulnerable, and at times, almost unrecognizable, even to himself.

The English actor looks much more reminiscent of his Pirates of the Caribbean days right now than the emotionally wrecked boxer audiences meet in film. It's been two years since he put his body through "extensive" trauma for this role, and it's clear that talking about it now, the experience still lingers.

"I really just wanted to burn the barn down and take the brakes off and really swing for the fences and go for this one," Bloom, 48, tells Yahoo.

Bloom, stripped down

He describes the personal and physical toll of embodying this character, known only as the Boxer, in blunt, matter-of-fact terms.

"We are built for sleep, food and water. When you take all three of those away — because you don't really sleep when you're that hungry..." he trails off. "I was sleeping a few hours a night. I literally had no mental or physical capacity. I was lying on the floor between takes and then getting up to work."

To accommodate his dramatic weight loss, Bloom says production began when he was at his lightest, shooting the movie in reverse chronological order. The very first scene they filmed required him to be completely bare, physically, standing on a scale. (What happens at the end of the weigh-in will make your jaw drop.)

When I ask Bloom about that day on set, he credits the cast and crew for making him feel "so safe" because he felt a sense of community. He says that support allowed him to embrace the sheer exposure the moment demanded, even as the physical toll was staggering.

“I hadn’t really drunk water because I was trying to get this really crazy dehydrated [look]. I was really restricting the water, and all of that made it just way harder than I had imagined,” he says, remembering a "feeling of vulnerability — and the feeling of starvation" that took place over three days.

To make sure his body could withstand this kind of drastic transformation, Bloom worked with Philip Goglia, a nutritionist who has guided other actors through extreme roles, including Christian Bale. He went down from three meals a day to one.

“[Goglia] was in lockstep with production to make sure we timed everything out,” Bloom says. But even with expert supervision, the process was grueling. “I couldn't get past 162 pounds; I was stuck at this weight. I photographed my scale every morning and sent it to him. Then just before filming, he said, ‘I want you to get in a hot bath.’”

Goglia had Bloom fill a tub with water and 25 pounds of Epsom salt. He had to soak in it, then drink two liters of water before going to bed. “I did it — do not do [this] at home — and I dropped 10 pounds overnight. I got down to the weight. It was crazy.”

The effects were as shocking as the method. “Your body just lets go after that process. That's how I got that very dry and not-pretty look.”

The whiplash of rebuilding

While filming The Cut, Bloom says he was “not a lot of fun to be around.”

“I didn’t feel very good — angry and hungry,” he says. The physical deprivation triggered more than just mood swings: Bloom says he grew paranoid and struggled to quiet his mind. There was practically “no acting involved,” he explains, because his shaky mental state mirrored that of his character.

“The feelings, the emotions, the intrusive thoughts in the mind, the physical exhaustion, the physicality — it all kind of came to fruition,” Bloom says.

If getting down to fighting weight was extreme, what happened next was almost as jarring. As soon as those shirtless scenes at his lowest weight were in the can, Bloom had to rapidly put pounds back on.

“I was just gorging food,” he says. “I had protein powder with ice cream, I had desserts.” His body, deprived for so long, didn’t process the sudden change well.

“It was almost — having been so lean and suddenly I'm getting weird rashes. It was just a lot,” he says. “Everything that happens [with extreme weight loss] — it’s not something that I would recommend to anyone.”

Age, image and industry pressure

The Cut isn’t just about a boxer battling to get back in the ring. It’s also a meditation on the realities of aging in a world obsessed with youth. Bloom’s character fights to stay relevant in a sport that favors the young, a struggle that’s all too familiar in Hollywood.

I ask Bloom if that's a parallel he drew and if those pressures — of always needing to look younger, to chase an impossible standard — ever get to him as an actor.

“Yeah, there’s a lot of parallels to life and the extremes that people will go through — the extreme measures to look a certain way, to feel a certain way,” Bloom says.

Extreme deprivation aside, Bloom says being stripped of every comfort influenced his current wellness routine. “Moderation is the best way to go,” he says, sounding more like a sage than a fighter.

Those learnings only come with time — and the humility to accept that our bodies change whether we like it or not. Bloom admits the experience led him to say goodbye to gluten when he can, cut back on dairy “to some extent,” and avoid sugar as much as possible.

“Everybody’s instrument — physical instrument being body — is different,” he says.

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