Among 2025 movie releases out this weekend is The Cut, starring Orlando Bloom as a fictional boxer. He has to go to great lengths to drop 32 pounds in the matter of a week in order to qualify for a boxing championship in Las Vegas after getting the offer out of the blue to come out of retirement. Bloom’s character decides to take on the challenge with the help of John Turturro’s unorthodox trainer, but my, my, is The Cut’s ending brutal.
When I spoke to Orlando Bloom and John Turturro about filming the grueling ending of The Cut, they explained how they actually started filming the latest of boxing movies with the end. As Bloom shared:
It was definitely a challenge to come in at the character's most distraught. But then, it was almost like no acting required because of the state of myself, both physically and mentally. I was sort of in the right headspace for all of it in a way. I don't know, I'm a bit OCD, but somehow working in reverse chronological [order] seemed to work for me because I started to map the movie in my mind.
The movie ends with the boxer (who is never named outright) doing the weigh-in that will determine if he can do the match. But when he steps on the scale in front of a crowd of people, he’s 0.02 pounds off. It’s maddening considering all the hell he put himself through, but the boxer doesn’t give up. In a daze, Bloom’s character ends up going up to a craft table and using a knife next to a hunk of ham to chop off two of his fingers. When he returns to the scale, he’s 153.98 pounds, making him eligible to go out and fight.
During our interview, Bloom detailed how he lost a dramatic 30 pounds like his character before coming on set to film the movie, but rather than doing so in a wildly unhealthy week, he did so across three months. By the time he arrived to set at the weight the boxer is at the end of the movie, he told us he “could hardly function” and his “brain capacity was limited at best”.
So, it wasn’t necessarily difficult to get in the mindset of the character, but working backwards on set actually ended up working to the actor’s favor. As he continued:
I was like, ‘Okay, well if we're doing this here, then when we get to this bit earlier, I've gotta make sure that I've got that there.’ I dunno why, but somehow it helped me, which is unusual 'cause you'd think it'd be the other way round. But weirdly, because I was like, ‘Oh, well we've done this here.’ So I had this mental note of what I wanted to do earlier at different points as well because of that.
Bloom said he’d write in the script what he’d done in the later parts of the script in order to remind himself and work backwards. He found that the way of filming tracked with his “funny way of thinking.” But, the real difficulty came in getting off his diet and moving to “constantly eating” after his “insane weight loss”. Bloom recalled how it messed with his hormones and “everything”.
2025 Emmy nominee John Turturro didn’t have a strict diet to adhere to, but he did recall what it felt like on set to film the movie basically backwards. Of course, he has Severance under his belt, where he and his castmates have to basically play two characters, but this was a different animal. As he added:
I don't know if it was the first scene, but it was in the first couple of days, I think. It was a hard scene period to do because you haven't gone through the whole experience. You're doing everything in reverse. You really have to have skill and be prepared to put yourself that way. But, I remember it was not easy. It was not easy.
The Cut ending is absolutely one of the most chilling scenes we’ve seen this year, and it’s interesting to hear how it actually went down on set. We’re even more impressed by these actors after hearing their perspectives.
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