Orlando Bloom: Middle-Earth's Ass-Kicking Sharpshooter Has Other Arrows in His Quiver

Tall, dark, and stupid-handsome, Orlando Bloom is the sexiest beast in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, playing the white-blond, blue-eyed 2,931-year old Legolas Greenleaf like Bowie with a bow and arrow. Having also appeared in Black Hawk Down, Bloom, 25, seems ripe for movie stardom. Or not. "I was getting legless drunk every night," he recalls of a recent trip to LA. Bloom's Hollywood moment came during a hung-over meeting when director Nick Cassvetes took a call from another actor. "Halfway through the call, he looked over and mouthed to me, "Mar-lon Bran-do! Can you fuckin' believe it? That was surreal!"

For an action hero and extreme sports enthusiast, however, Bloom is a disaster. "I feel like I'm in competition with Evel Knievel," says the actor, who once broke his back falling off a friend's terrace. "For four days they didn't think I'd walk again. Now if I start to take on too much, my back goes, `Twang! Listen, man, remember who you are.'"

Orlando Bloom--"my real name, and a hard one to live up to"--was born in Canterbury, England. He won competitions reciting poetry and Bible passages. "I was always meeting really cool European chicks," says Bloom, who lost his virginity to "an English rose" at fourteen. He's had a way with women ever since.

Though he favors Jeff Buckley and Ben Harper, as befits a serious actor, Bloom is also pleased to be the lord of the teen-girl Web rings. "Maybe our generation is more about sex, but it feels like romance is dying out," he says. "In England, when you meet someone, you're normally quite drunk and end up having some messy little snog in a cab on the way home."