On discovering that his dad was not his biological father: “Think about that. Think about finding out when you’re 13 that your dad is not your dad. It’s like, okay, take it on the chin and keep going. No choice, really.” (His dad was anti-apartheid lawyer and activist Harry Bloom. His actual father was a friend of the family named Colin Stone.)
On his filming two trilogies back-to-back: “I’ve been white-knuckling it for so long. Between the first Lord of the Rings and this [Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End], I’ve been going nonstop. I would come off one movie and straightaway start the next picture. I wasn’t even really thinking about it, I was letting the machinery sort of run me. So now, on a personal level, I just want some time and space from everything, from all that; from the environment and the phone and the communication.”
On turning 30 in January and for the first time in a decade having nothing to do: “Look, it all felt important, too important, but now I’m in a position to—look, I’m trying not to take myself so seriously, and in not taking myself so seriously, I think I’ll be more serious.”
On learning at 13 that his dad was not his biological father: “Think about that. Think about finding out when you’re 13 that your dad is not your dad. It’s like, okay, take it on the chin and keep going. No choice, really.”
On being told by doctors at 21 that he might never walk again: “For four days I was thinking this was it, that I would be living my life in a wheelchair, and then I thought, no, and I knew I would walk. I just knew.”
On being famous: “There’s all this noise that happens. I was 22 when I got The Lord of the Rings. Nobody tells you what it is like to be famous—there’s no guidebook, you know what I mean?”
On the Crusades epic Kingdom of Heaven: “When you’re [almost] 27 years old and Fox greenlights a movie with a budget of $150 million with you as the headliner, that’s a tribute. And then all the press afterward was like I hadn’t come through on something, sort of like I hadn’t delivered. But what did I not come through on?”
On his career: “I have the patience to trust my own journey. Life is going to unfold as it should because life always does. If I’m true to myself, then all the rest is like, f*** it, man.”
On being a Buddhist: “The philosophy that I’ve embraced isn’t about sitting under a tree and studying my navel, it’s about studying what is going on in my daily life and using that as fuel to go and live a bigger life. When your girlfriend dumps you, when the bill comes through the door, and your mom calls you and tells you she can’t handle the stuff in her life—that’s hell, but that’s just one world. If you are aware of what is going on, then you can grow and use that hunger, that fear.”
On spending three weeks aboard a Norwegian icebreaker bound for Antarctica: “I felt isolated and vulnerable and I just had all this time to think. I just had time to read and think and I figured out that this moment, now, is when I can use everything that I’ve done to my advantage, to choose a great project, to do something great and take a risk. I’m looking around and going, I cannot fucking believe how lucky I’ve been—Pirates has afforded me the luxury of choice, and with those choices comes responsibility but also freedom. I can figure out exactly what I want to do.”
On the downside of being in Pirates of the Caribbean: “There really is no downside, I’ve got to tell you. It’s put me in a position where I can wait and see what happens and now figure out what I really want to do.”
