With his impish charm, he’s king of the Tolkien trilogy. Viva Orlando Bloom, says Kate Bernard Basking today in the California sunshine, Orlando Bloom has come a long way since appearing in the dread hospital drama Casualty. Indeed, he has arrived – in the form of a noble elf, Legolas Greenleaf – in the fantasy film trilogy of the decade, The Lord Of The Rings.

The puckish 24-year-old landed the role 48 hours before graduating from Guildhall in London, where he’d been studying drama. He soon found himself flying to New Zealand with Billy Boyd (aka Peregrin ‘Pippin’ Took), where they joined Cate Blanchett, Liv Tyler and other woodland creatures for an intensive 18-month shoot of all three films.

Born in Canterbury, the young Bloom decided all the world was a stage when he realised that Christopher Reeve was acting the part of Superman: ‘I wanted to be some of these larger-than-life characters.’ Though he had abandoned Tolkien’s books as a boy, the text became ‘a bible’ for Bloom during filming. ‘We were shooting out of sequence, and jumping between films, so reading it helped me to place myself visually.’

Bloom ached for danger and took up surfing with Boyd and other members of the cast – ‘surfing hobbits,’ he jokes. Boyd allegedly ‘freaked’ while surfing at night, mistaking a seal’s flipper for the fin of a great white, and put our hero between himself and the phantom shark. The animal-loving Bloom – who misses his pet bitch, Maude, ‘like mad’ when abroad – didn’t even flinch. Of course not.