Orlando Bloom weighs in on Keira Knightley's Pirates of the Caribbean admission
The actor played Knightley's love interest Will Turner in three of the swashbuckling adventure films from 2003 to 2007, with the pair returning as a cameo in 2017 sequel Dead Men Tell No Tales.
While the franchise made global stars of both Bloom and Knightley, the British actor said in a recent interview that it wasn't all fun and games starring in the films as she felt the franchise was simultaneously 'making and breaking' her.
'I was seen as s*** because of them, and yet because they did so well I was given the opportunity to do the films that I ended up getting Oscar nominations for,' the star of Pride and Prejudice and Atonement told The Times.
Bloom has now spoken out about Knightley's musings on her experience, telling Entertainment Weekly: 'I definitely understand where Keira was coming from, and she does wonderful things [in the films].
The actor said that he has 'a lot of positive takeaways' from his time starring in the blockbusters.
He continued: 'It was such a huge moment in time that is almost like … it feels almost like another lifetime now. But it certainly was unique and, you know, I'm always grateful.'
Elaborating on her time starring in the Pirates franchise, Knightley said: 'They were the most successful films I'll ever be a part of and they were the reason that I was taken down publicly.
'So they're a very confused place in my head.'
A sixth Pirates of the Caribbean film is in the works, with producer Jerry Bruckheimer appearing to confirm in 2024 that lead star Johnny Depp would not be involved.
The producing maestro, whose Top Gun: Maverick had huge box office success in 2022, told ComicBook.com: 'With Top Gun, you have an actor who is iconic and brilliant [Tom Cruise]. But we're gonna reboot Pirates, so that is easier to put together because you don't have to wait for certain actors.'
The possibility of Depp returning to the Pirates franchise was the subject of testimony during his defamation trial with ex-wife Amber Heard.
Depp was asked by Heard's lawyer: 'If Disney came to you with $300m dollars and a million alpacas, nothing on this earth would get you to go back and work with Disney on a Pirates of the Caribbean film?'
'That is true,' Depp answered.
While the legal battle was ongoing, Bruckheimer told The Times that Disney had no plans to bring Depp back as Captain Jack Sparrow, but added: 'The future is yet to be decided.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Scottish Sun
44 minutes ago
- Scottish Sun
Influencer & extreme sport enthusiast, 28, died after ‘tumbling through the air' as she fell 60ft off Brit mountain
The influencer was sadly pronounced dead at the scene TRAGIC END Influencer & extreme sport enthusiast, 28, died after 'tumbling through the air' as she fell 60ft off Brit mountain Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) AN influencer and extreme sports enthusiast died after "tumbling through the air" in a 60ft plunge off a British mountain Maria Eftimova, 28, went hiking up the 3,000ft peak before slipping on rocky ground and tumbling down the mountain to her death. 4 Maria amassed 10,000 followers, showcasing her outdoor lifestyle online Credit: WNS 4 She was a keen mountaineer Credit: WNS Maria suffered fatal head injuries and, despite the best efforts of medical staff, was tragically pronounced dead at the scene. The influencer, with more than 10,000 followers, was tackling the notorious Tryfan mountain in Snowdonia, North Wales, when she fell to her death. An inquest into her death heard she was climbing the mountain's notorious north ridge - a popular but dangerous scrambling route. Maria was an experienced mountaineer and had completed an ice-climbing course in Norway shortly before the horror unfolded. The inquest has heard how she posed for a "Mexican wave" with friends before she fell to her death. Fellow climber Harry Jones said the group were going up the face one-by-one when he witnessed Maria's tragic fall. He added: "I could see on one particular ledge Maria stopped in order to get a handhold to pull herself up, I was six ft below her, to the left. "She swung her right leg up to pull herself up. I asked 'Got it well?' and she said 'I think so." He said moments later he witnessed Maria "flying over me" and down the mountainside. The 60ft plummet left Maria with horrific injuries, including a fractured skull.. Coroner Kate Robertson returned a conclusion of accidental death and passed on her condolences to Maria's family and friends. Maria, of St Helens, originally from Sofia, Bulgaria, showcased her outdoor lifestyle online. Terrifying moment Scotland's top ranked skier plunges down mountain & suffers horror injuries Following her tragic death a fundraiser was set up by friends to help cover repatriation costs. Maria's tragic death on February 22nd came less than a week after Dr Charlotte Crook, 30, also died while climbing in the same region. An inquest heard Dr Crook plunged 30ft to her death while walking on Glyder Fach with a fellow medic. Both women were attended to by Ogwen Valley Mountain Rescue Organisation. 4 An inquest heard Maria posed with pals for a "Mexican wave" before tumbling to her death Credit: WNS 4 Despite the best efforts of medics Maria tragically died at the scene Credit: WNS Speaking of Maria's accident, the Ogwen Valley Mountain Rescue team said: "A group was ascending the north-ridge when one of them fell 20 metres into steep terrain. "Passers-by with climbing equipment abseiled down and made her safe, and a team member already nearby made his way down and started CPR. "Colleagues from Welsh Ambulance Service stood by at base while the Coastguard helicopter dropped team members onto the mountain. "Unfortunately, the casualty had not survived her injuries, and she was brought down to Oggie base. "The thoughts of all involved are with the casualties families and friends, thank you to all the members of the public who tried to help." Neil Oakes, who was on a slightly different route up the mountain at the time Maria fell, told of his horror at witnessing the tragedy unfold. He said: "I turned and saw Ms Eftimova tumbling through the air below me. She was already in freefall. "I knew there was going to be an impact on the rocky outcrop below so I turned away for a split second. I was shouting 'No, no, no, no.' "When I turned back she was on the ledge below. I knew that it was serious. "I said 'She's gone. She's fallen.' I was in shock."
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Admirable in their awfulness – the siblings Gus and Gwen John
'In 50 years' time,' Augustus John gloomily reflected following his sister's death on 18 September 1939, 'I will be known as the brother of Gwen John.' He was right. In 2004, when the Tate mounted a joint retrospective of Augustus and Gwen John, it was Gwen who had become the major artist. The 'variable strident chords' of the self-styled Gypsy King, likened in his youth to Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Raphael, had been supplanted by the 'sustained minor key' of the nunlike recluse. The first decades of the 20th century were what Virginia Woolf described as 'the Age of Augustus John'; but the praise lathered on him after his own death, aged 83, in 1961 – 'one of the greatest artists in British history', 'a man in the 50-megaton range', 'the last of the Titans' – now seems embarrassing. The reputation of Gus, as Gwen called him, with Judith Mackrell following suit in her absorbing dual biography, had been on the wane since the 1930s. In the 1940s he despaired that 'my work's not good enough'. 'I'm just a legend,' he said in the 1950s, 'I'm not a real person at all.' Again, he was right: Augustus John is remembered now for his flamboyant hats, gold earrings, open marriage and the 100 offspring he is rumoured to have sired. When he walked through Chelsea, it was said, he patted the head of every child he met in case it was one of his own. Aged 82, he wrote to one of his daughters, Amaryllis, that should she 'ever feel the need' to have a baby, 'just give me a nudge and I will do my best'. His suggestion, Mackrell comments, 'might have been judged goatish, or even outlandish, to an outsider', but to Amaryllis, 'it reflected only their private code'. The middle two of four children, Gwen and Gus were raised in the Welsh seaside town of Tenby, where they ran wild with their sketchbooks. Gwen was eight when their mother died in 1884, and Gus six. 'Mama's dead! Mama's dead!' the siblings chanted, charging through the house in a crazed state. The near-demented erotic pursuits of their adulthood were born from this early abandonment. A figure of 'vast carelessness', as Mackrell describes him, Gus was a man on the run, brawling and shagging, while Gwen, inward-looking and fearing attention, lived and painted in slow time. He was 6ft and lavishly handsome; she was a wiry and feral 5ft; he was agnostic and she was a Catholic; he chose a large metropolitan existence and she a small life in rural France. They would appear to observers like the tortoise and the hare, but on closer inspection they were, as Gus put it, 'much the same, really'. Gus described the force of his desire as 'a sort of paranoia or emotional hailstorm' It is the similarities that Mackrell draws out with her customary care. Cut from the same cloth, brother and sister were both monsters. Artists to the core, they were equally selfish, obsessive and dangerous to know, particularly if you had the misfortune to be loved by one of them. Gus described the force of his desire as 'a sort of paranoia or emotional hailstorm'; as soon as he was attracted to one woman, who invariably became his model, she would be 'immediately obliterated' by another. Gwen was less fickle, but more terrifying. Her passions for both men and women were similarly immediate and overwhelming, affecting her, as she put it, 'beyond reason'. She behaved like a stalker, besieging her love objects with daily letters, debasing herself, waiting on their every word. Even her mentor Rodin, with whom she was besotted for a decade, was afraid of her. His death in 1917 freed Gwen from her sickness, but her place in his life had been 'a secret so small', as Mackrell puts it, that she was not even invited tohis funeral. When Gus went to the Slade, aged 16, in 1894, Gwen followed suit, but only after a fight. Doors swung open for Gus, but everything Gwen did involved a struggle, initially with their father, Edwin. When he would not let her go to Paris to be taught by Whistler, Gwen marched round the house singing 'to Paris, to Paris' until he gave in. When Edwin then told her that she looked, in the white dress she had copied from a painting by Manet, like a prostitute, she excised him from her life. Included in the Paris trip was Ida Nettleship, Gwen's best friend at the Slade before she became Gus's wife when they were both aged 23. His maîtresse-en-titre, the beautiful and otherworldly Dorothy 'Dorelia' McNeill, was similarly stolen from Gwen, who then tried to steal her back when Dorelia joined her on a walking tour to Rome. The two women set off together, says Mackrell, like a 'giddy eloping couple', but there was what Dorelia called a 'hard and queer' quality to Gwen's character and, having got as far as Toulouse, she eloped instead with a Belgian called Leonard. No one was allowed to leave Gus, who importuned Dorelia to separate first from Gwen and then from Leonard, and live instead in 'wonderful concubinage' with himself and Ida. Gwen, with nothing left to lose, now sided with her brother. Even Ida, who wanted her freedom back, could see the benefits of including Dorelia in the household. Living with Gus, 'a mean and childish creature', was pushing her towards a breakdown. And so docile Dorelia, who did what others wanted her to do, returned to England and devoted the next 60 years to Gus and his spawn. When Ida died exhausted, aged 30, after giving birth to her sixth son, Dorelia (who died in 1969) took over the household, at which point this once radiant figure disappears from view. It is not surprising, given his raids on her emotions, that Gwen now cordoned herself off from Gus. Moving to France, she refused to visit her nephews and nieces in England or use the studio that Gus built for her in his garden. Family was everything to Gus, while for Gwen, 'the family has had its day. We don't go to Heaven in families now, but one by one'. Gwen behaved like a stalker, besieging her love objects with daily letters, waiting on their every word While Gus's unconventionality became a pose to sell his paintings, Gwen's refusal to conform to any socially acceptable female norm was the cost of competing as an artist on equal terms with men. He was greedy, but she was an extremophile. As a student, she was so poor that she would break into abandoned buildings in order to sleep. When she lost her adored cat, she slept in the forest. She died, aged 63, in Dieppe, where she had gone for an overnight stay without bringing any luggage. In the chaos of war, the cause of her death, which appears to have been starvation, was left unspecified on her death certificate, and the details of where she was buried were lost. Her friend Louise Roche described Gwen at the end as 'treating her body as though she was its executioner… To go to the doctor inconvenienced her, to take solid nourishment inconvenienced her'. As tough and implacable as a medieval saint, Gwen painted for God. Her pictures were 'prayers', not objects to be bought and displayed. Despairing of her unworldliness, her patron, the American collector John Quinn, despatched his mistress, Jeanne Robert Foster, to form a friendship with his elusive genius. 'All the pathetic dramatisation of life has fallen away,' Jeanne reported to Quinn. 'Gwen is real.' Her life, said Wyndham Lewis, was 'chaste and bare and sad'. Why, he wondered, had she kept herself 'so isolated from the influences of her age'? She influenced, however, our own age: the successor of Gwen John is Celia Paul. Gwen's intransigence and resolve, what Mackrell calls her 'stubborn grit', can be seen in her first self-portrait, painted in 1899-1900, when Gus and Ida were falling in love. Here was a woman, hand on hip, who would be no one's wife or mother, who saw anything but the most primitive domestic conditions as 'bourgeoise'. Gwen was not eccentric: she had a demon inside her. It is hard to tell, Mackrell says in her opening pages, if Gus and Gwen were 'admirable or awful'. By the end of this haunting book they seem admirable in their awfulness.
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
Channel 4's Beth is a sad glimpse into the future of terrestrial TV
On the face of it, Beth seemed that most old-fashioned of TV genres: the single play. In fact, Monday's programme was the complete version of a three-parter made for YouTube and excitedly announced as Channel 4's first-ever digital commission. A less excited interpretation, however, might be that it was Channel 4's first sign of surrender to the hostile forces of streaming now threatening all of Britain's terrestrial networks. Either way, it was a peculiar watch that, over the course of its 36 minutes, felt less like a fully fledged drama than notes towards one. In a nervous bid to ensure YouTube viewers were gripped before they could search for something else, it began with a good-looking couple having sex. But not for long. Within 50 seconds, the man, Joe, noticed blood on the sheets and the woman, Molly, realised she'd had the latest in a series of miscarriages. Seconds after that, the pair were visiting their hunky private doctor who advised them to knock off the IVF, in favour of 'lots of sex': advice he bestowed with a distinct leer in Molly's direction. Following the consultation, Joe and Molly (Nicholas Pinnock and Abbey Lee) wondered about adoption or fostering, but as an interracial couple, decided they wanted 'our kid to look like both of us'. In one of these 'notes towards' moments, it also appeared that Joe himself had been unhappily fostered. But of course there wasn't time to get into that and instead the first 12-minute section ended with Molly suddenly pregnant. Once she was, there were some more hints at a theme the show would clearly have liked to explore in more depth, in this case Joe's class unease about having a much posher partner. Yet, no sooner was this suggested than we cut to the delivery room, where Molly gave birth to a white baby – moments later, a white primary-school girl whom Joe, now separated from Molly, was picking up from a party. Despite his (and our) suspicions, the reason for the child's colour wasn't the pervy doctor, but something wholly unguessable which relied on a lurch into the supernatural that I'd better not spoil, but that, once again, the show didn't have time either to prepare us for or to reflect on, and so simply plonked in front of us. Beth was by no means a disaster. The two leads did their considerable best with what they had to work on – as did the script, which often managed to be intriguing before the time constraints rendered it merely frustrating. Nonetheless, you couldn't help thinking how much more could have been done with the material in a mini-series that wasn't quite so mini. If this was a glimpse of the terrestrial-TV future, the best you can say is that its programmes certainly won't overstay their welcome; the worst is that they'll be badly lacking in the swagger and storytelling confidence of the pre-streaming era. Still, if it's old-fashioned you want, there's always Not Going Out – the longest-running sitcom now on British television and by some distance the most traditional. There remains something almost heroic about Mack's determination to keep the British-sitcom faith Defending his chosen form, its creator Lee Mack said recently: 'The thing you always hear people say about studio sitcoms is: 'They're so 1970s.' But then you ask people to name their favourite British sitcoms and they're all from the 1970s: Fawlty Towers, Dad's Army, Steptoe and Son.' Sadly, I'm not convinced that many of these 'people' would be under 50. But there remains something almost heroic about Mack's determination to keep the British-sitcom faith, especially as he can get at least as many laughs from his lightning ad-libs on Would I Lie to You? without any of the hard writing yards required here. Even so, it's not quite true, despite those references, that the show's influences are all British – because it's too full of wisecracks for that. Captain Mainwaring, Basil Fawlty and the Steptoes would be wildly indignant if they knew we were laughing at them, whereas the characters in Not Going Out (like those in say Cheers and Frasier) constantly make remarks that are intended to be funny. So it was that the 14th series started with the fictional Lee and his wife Lucy (Sally Bretton) being shown round a property by a seller who doubled as a straight man setting up Lee and Lucy's stream of one-liners – which carried on just as relentlessly once the episode developed into a full-blown, well-plotted farce based, naturally, on implausible lies, implausibly believed. I can't claim that Not Going Out is among my weekly unmissables (unlike Would I Lie to You?). But I'm definitely delighted that Mack continues to fly the flag for a sitcom that has no desire to throw in some dark drama to provide an edifying moral lesson – or indeed to do anything much beyond making us laugh.
