Orlando Bloom Wants To Return To His Best Franchise
Orlando Bloom is interested in reprising the role of Will Turner from the Pirates of the Caribbean.
Orlando Bloom seems to be interested in returning to the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise as Will Turner, the humble blacksmith turned eventual ghostly wanderer of the seas. According to an interview in Parade, the Lord of the Rings star “wouldn’t mind seeing what Will looked like today in some ways” and that it would “be interesting to see how he surfaces and what he’s like.” Orlando Bloom might actually get his wish on this one, as the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has been seemingly perpetually on the verge of a revival for years.
Orlando Bloom last appeared in a Pirates of the Caribbean movie in 2017 for Dead Men Tell No Tales (or Salazar’s Revenge, depending on where you live). By that movie, his role had been reduced to a brief appearance at the end of the film and a post-credits scene that seemed to hint that he would be facing off against the tentacle-faced Davy Jones (who had previously been played by Bill Nighy but appeared via CGI there).
That is par for the course when it comes to Orlando Bloom and the Pirates of the Caribbean, in many ways. While the Carnival Row star was originally presented as the co-lead of the series with Keira Knightley, Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow almost immediately became the face and center of the franchise, while Will Turner (and to an even greater extent, Knightley’s Elizabeth Swann) became more and more of a supporting character.
However, now that Johnny Depp’s future with the Walt Disney Company is on extremely shaky ground, it could be a good time for Orlando Bloom to reassert himself in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. The series has been dormant since Dead Men Tell No Tales, with constant reports that Disney was looking to revive the series with Dwayne Johnson as a lead or Maya Hawke or Margot Robbie or Dylan O’Brien or maybe even just as an animated series or whatever the company can persuade people to be interested in.
Legacy sequels (i.e., sequels in which some older stars appear to support and pass the narrative over to new characters) have been increasingly favored by studios in recent years, with the Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer being just some of the franchises looking for a new extension. Orlando Bloom reappearing as Will Turner in a new Pirates of the Caribbean project might be exactly the kind of angle Disney needs, especially if it can avoid the problematic issues of Johnny Depp’s personal life and legal issues.
In the Parade interview, Orlando Bloom also points out that he had a lot of fun reprising his Lord of the Rings character Legolas in the Hobbit trilogy of films, which leads him to believe a Pirates of the Caribbean appearance could be equally enjoyable. At this point, Disney has let the franchise sit fallow for six years now and is no doubt getting pretty antsy to utilize the property once again. This could just be the thing.
