“It’s just the excitement of being at Disney,” Bloom tells me. “It would be like this for anyone.”
Nice try, pal.
“There’s absolutely nothing sexually threatening about an elf,” Bloom says earnestly. (Grandma should embroider that on a pillow.) “Legolas is a good, safe guy for girls to pin their dreams on.” And so was Bloom—you didn’t want to sleep with him, exactly, just doodle his name in your three-ring binder. Nearly 200 fan sites sprang up overnight. Leo DiCaprio has only 80. Who’s king of the world now?
“Orlando’s a one-man boy band,” says “Pirates” costar Keira Knightley, whose fetching Elizabeth Swann gets some above-the-corset action with her fellow Brit—which helped earn the film’s PG-13 rating, a Disney first. So far, it’s Bloom’s only on-screen romance, and Knightley (of “Bend It Like Beckham”) is bracing for a teeny-bopper backlash. “We were filming our kiss, and someone brought her daughters to the set,” she recalls. “I thought I was going to be lynched by a little blond mob.” Might any good come from deflowering Bloom?