Carlton Bloom is the main antagonist of The National Anthem. He is a deranged artist that won a Turner Prize award.
History[]
While attending the wedding of a college friend of hers, Susannah is sedated and kidnapped by Bloom, who films a ransom video where she reads out a demand to Prime Minister Michael Callow: in order to spare her life, the PM must broadcast himself having sexual intercourse with a pig.
He had encrypted the video and even set up a decoy at an abandoned college campus with a proxy, all to avoid detection. Meanwhile, under a secret order of Alex Cairns, an arrangement to fabricate the video was attempted, with the plan being to swap Callow's head onto pornographic actor Rod Senseless and fake the Prime Minister caving to his demands. A person at the studio where the video would have been made spots Senseless and takes a photo, which goes viral on Twitter. Bloom and other internet users were able to decipher the video was going to be faked, causing Bloom to seemingly cut off one of Susannah's fingers and sending the severed finger to UKN. This causes public opinion to sway, with a vast majority of the UK population now saying Callow should fulfill the demand.
After wasting too much time on alternatives and finding the decoy at the campus, Callow has no choice but to do what Bloom demanded. He has intercourse with the pig on live TV, crying whilst doing it. Princess Susannah was indeed released, but it turns out from a CCTV footage that Bloom had released her half an hour before the 4 PM deadline. The finger he sent was also his own, revealing he merely did this to prove some kind of point. He hanged himself after releasing Susannah.