Hey, Remember When Orlando Bloom Tried (and Failed) To Punch Justin Bieber?

After several weeks of carefully planted sources laying the groundwork for the announcement, Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom split up after nine years together. It’s never easy to deal with a break-up, especially in the public eye, when one of you is in your so-called flop era. Certainly, Perry has embodied a lot of Divorced Dad energy for several months now: driving a Tesla, a misguided fashion makeover, taking up questionable hobbies like becoming an 11-minute astronaut. While Perry has been only too happy to cuddle to up the likes of Jeff Bezos in the past, she was notably not at his recent wedding to Lauren Sanchez, a tacky extravaganza of oligarchical mania that all but shut down the entire city of Venice. Bloom was there, however, schmoozing with people far richer than he.

For all of the mockery of Perry, justified or otherwise, it’s become entirely too easy to overlook the fact that Orlando Bloom is completely woo-woo. In his beyond parodic morning routine, which he shared with The Sunday Times, he talked about his supplements routine, which included ‘brain octane oil,’ and how beautiful he thinks cows are. For many years, he was associated with the Soka Gakkai sect, a Japanese new religion based on Buddhist teachings with a controversial past and accusations that it’s really a cult. By his own admission, he is ‘very LA’, although he also has business deals with Amazon, which makes one wonder how a quest for spiritual zen is compatible with sucking at the corporate teat of Jeff the union buster.

Bloom is not as famous as he once was, when Will Turner and Legolas dominated the pop culture landscape, but he’s steadily worked for over two decades and has some interesting projects under his belt (he recently wrapped shooting on a Werner Herzog movie). There was a period where he was seen as the undisputed future of Hollywood, which never came to be because of a few commercial disappointments and the overwhelming understanding that Bloom was never, to put it kindly, the next Daniel Day-Lewis. Frankly, being with Perry kept him in the spotlight more thoroughly over the past decade than his work. So, watching him avoid most of the negative press surrounding this split reminded me of perhaps his tabloid nadir: that time he took a swing at Justin Bieber and missed!

Picture the scene. August 2014. Canada’s very own Justin Bieber is in the midst of a chaotic public spiral that’s seen him labelled repeatedly as a petulant brat who it’s okay to hate. Bloom hasn’t had a box office hit in years and has returned to playing Legolas in the maligned Hobbit movies. The boxing gloves are off, and the biggest anticlimax of the year is about to unfold.

The fight — if we can even call it that — took place at a restaurant in Ibiza. It was rumoured to have been centred on Miranda Kerr, the Australian supermodel and ex-wife of Bloom. TMZ had two versions of the story provided by sources. One account had Justin trying to shake Bloom’s hand, which he refused because of Bieber’s previous closeness to Kerr. She and Bieber were rumoured to have had a quickie at some point in the past. ‘Justin then tried to walk away and that’s when Orlando swung.’ The second account said that ‘Justin said something to the effect of, I had sex with your wife … and THEN Orlando swung.’

Alas, there is no video of the actual swing, but Bloom never made physical contact with Bieber, who then reportedly screamed, ‘What’s up, bitch?’ When Bieber left the restaurant, the crowd applauded. Hours after the fight, Bieber, ever a messy social media presence, posted and then deleted an Instagram photo of Kerr in a bikini. Messy, right? Well, perhaps tensions were heightened even further by Bloom having hung out with Bieber’s own ex, Selena Gomez, a few months prior to the ‘fight.’ The pair were photographed together, sitting on a kerb, with Bloom looking wasted and Gomez seeming rather embarrassed.

Here’s the thing: if you are going to start a fight, you have to finish it. If you’re going to potentially risk arrest and embarrassment by punching Justin Bieber when he’s at his most unpopular, then you have to actually hit him. Swinging and missing is no fun, although it was probably legally preferable for Bloom and his team. Perhaps we’re more mature now, but a decade ago, people were desperate to see Orlando Bloom pummel Bieber to dust. The Guardian wrote that Bieber was engaging in ‘gold-plated villainy.’ He had been arrested for the first time that January on suspicion of DUI, which led to more than 270,000 people petitioning the White House to have him deported. That same year, old footage of him using the N-word went viral. He was accused of vandalism and reckless driving. He notoriously wrote in the guestbook of the Anne Frank House that hopefully the victim of the Holocaust ‘would have been a belieber.’ Truly, fairy-tale ogres were less loathsome than Justin was at this point.

But there was also no dignity in this tiff, nor any sense of satisfaction. This was embarrassing, in large part because it became a big old nothing so quickly. We didn’t even get a real fight, which would have been something. If Bloom was hoping to reclaim some of his lost honour, he failed. Bieber went back to being a trainwreck, sliding further into public embarrassment with obvious struggles that few people took seriously. As far as I can ascertain, Bloom has not gotten into any further attempted scuffles since this. Perhaps Buddhist chanting and nights out with the Bezos posse have calmed him down.