Hello … I’m not Johnny Cash.
Don’t look like him either. I do, apparently, resemble Joaquin Phoenix, who channels Cash in the biopic “Walk the Line”; Gael Garcia Bernal; Antonio Banderas; and, a recent favorite, Prince. In the past, it has been Matt Dillon, Sal Mineo, Rudolph Valentino and even Luis Polonia, a former baseballer with a Jeri Curl look.
But I’ll take Polonia, dripping with product, any day over Orlando Bloom. We don’t – underscore, italics don’t – resemble each other, even though a few magazine covers suggest otherwise to some obviously blind observers.
There’s the matter of jutting chins and curly dark hair, but I give no ground. He’s paler and a decade younger.
The primary reason I don’t look like Orlando Bloom is because Orlando Bloom plays a cowardly prince in “Troy,” a knock-kneed crusader in “Kingdom of Heaven” and a big fish in a small-town pond who tries to resist Kirsten Dunst in whatever that film’s called. Men wage actual wars to avoid being called pretty and ineffectual.
Sure, it was flattering at first. Celebrity comparisons bring a flush of vanity: A powerful, ostensibly handsome guy in effect brushes our sleeve because someone sees a resemblance. Then comes the hangover of realizing you’re never quite you when held up against someone else.
Depending on the famous guy’s stature, we reap the short-term consequences of his worth. Garcia Bernal illuminates Che Guevara in “The Motorcycle Diaries,” so resembling him confers a strange credibility. I don’t want to know what it means to look like Tom Arnold.
The closer the likeness, the more we become facsimiles, sudden stand-ins on a film set. Actor Clive Owen, fine, I’ll play the understudy: granite jaw, meaty fists, the dark stare of a Brit one step ahead. Show me a scene he doesn’t commandeer.
Orlando Bloom, however, has “leading man” written, then erased, all over him. No amount of film-studio branding can convince us he and Leo DiCaprio don’t share a fraternity handshake.
Besides, being older, I looked like me long before Orlando Bloom looked like himself. If you want to call him my doppelganger, fine. You’d still be wrong, but at least seniority wins out.
I’m sure he’s a perfectly nice fellow, kind to his mom and woodland creatures. But even if I were the type who slithered next to women and said, “People are always mistaking me for Orlando Bloom,” what would it get me? Probably a woman quoting a recent New Yorker assessment of “Kingdom of Heaven”: “Bloom wore the air not of a militant knight but of a worried boy who badly needed to pee.”
The only time looking like someone else ever helped me romantically was in the California wine country. The guy was a dim-bulb womanizer by many accounts, but chiseled, an exotic dancer named Jesse, I think.
Some of the hottest women in Santa Rosa would sidle up to me at pubs, batting their eyes in ways most of us only experience in the movies.
“Hey, Jesse!” they would purr before I stupidly corrected them. Some hung around anyway, maybe for the novelty of meeting the almost-Jesse.
I even went on a date with one of his groupies. She never asked me to wear a tuxedo that vanished with a single tug, or gyrate on a table.
Still, I’m pretty sure she was disappointed.
Staff writer Vic Vogler can be reached at 303-820-1749 or vvogler@denverpost.com.
