Of all the new faces in The Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring, the one I would pick for major stardom is Orlando Bloom, and that's because, when I met him for the first time, I did not recognise him.

It was a full year before the film's premiere, at a screening of work-in-progress footage where journalists where shown about 30 minutes of the film and met the cast. I had been struck by the wonderfully true realisation of Legolas Greenleaf, the Elvish archer. The slender cat-like warrior with the jewelled eyes, noble bearing and cascade of blond hair seemed to have sprung directly from the pages of Tolkien's novel.

When Bloom walked into the room, I had to check my schedule to make sure there was no mistake. His pitch-black hair was shaved close to his skull. He wore funky earrings, showed a tattoo or two and was wearing a voluminous pair of trousers, skin tight over the hips, that ballooned into a flare of tie-dyed white fabric. He looked like a rave bunny on his way home from the club with his naughty eyes and slight London accent.

I didn't recognise him, and, because of that, I knew at once how good he was in the film. The real Bloom had totally vanished into the courtly grace of Legolas.It was like a feat of acting magic from which he was still reeling.

"It's really been like magic for me" he said, "because I got this role just three weeks after I left drama school and I got it because they rejected me for another role."

Bloom had been asked to audition for the far smaller role of Faramir and knew instinctively that he had not done well in his bid for that part.

Then he was called back for what he thought was a second chance at Faramir. Instead they offered him Legolas.

"I was bouncing off the walls," he said. For a young actor to work with the class of actors on Lord of the Rings is unbelievable. I didn't even blink. It was like 'Where do I sign up!' It was just bonkers. It was like someone saying to me 'Here have a life', and I took it."

It wasn't his first film. He had played one of Oscar Wilde's rent boys in Wilde and had done a couple of professional plays while he was studying, but he followed these fledgling efforts with nearly a year on location in New Zealand with some of the world's top actors. He learned how to surf and nearly broke his back - a second time. He was thrown from his horse and smashed a few ribs, but he took that in his stride. When he was 17, he fell out of a third story window and was told he would never walk again. Two months later, he walked out of hospital.

"I'm rather accident prone. I've broken my back, my ribs, my nose, both my legs, my arm, my wrist, a finger and a toe and cracked my skull three times. But it works for me because when I was up for the part in Black Hawk Down they told me the soldier I was going to play broke his back. I gave them a list of my injuries and I got the part. You never know what's going to make them choose one actor over another."

The next time I saw him was a year later at the film's world premiere in London and, this time, everyone recognised him. He was sporting a wavy mullet haircut, a full year before David Beckham got his, wearing a blue velvet suit a Regency dandy might have killed for and donning a red rose as a button hole. He was a genuine star with websites created by adoring fans and paparazzi tracking his every move. But he turned out to be the same really nice bloke I met a year before.

He had just scored a fat role in The Kelly Gang. After that, he was setting off to play in the Pirates of the Caribbean and had signed up for the Calcium Kid, to be shot in London in 2003.

He wasn't star-struck anymore, but he was still in awe of how his life had changed. Interview over, he headed over to the after-party, and, later, when I was leaving, at about 4am the next morning, I saw him on the pavement outside the hotel seriously snogging the prettiest blond girl I had seen all night.

It seems you can turn a wild boy into a movie star, but can never get the wild boy out of the movie star, and I remembered a quote he gave to another journalist at those interviews. Asked how much he was being paid, he said, " I don't care much about the money at all. Frankly if I get a chance to kiss someone in a movie they wouldn't need to pay me at all".

Orlando Bloom is now getting the roles he is getting the money and he's getting the kisses, and I think he's at the start of a movie arc that's going to take him higher than he imagines.

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