Pine serious about accidental job
WEST HOLLYWOOD, California — Looking at Chris Pine’s career, it is hard to imagine that he did not always harbour a passion to be an actor.
In little more than a decade since his first big-screen role (the sequel to The Princess Diaries), Pine, 35, has established himself as one of the most recognizable stars of his generation. He has got his third Star Trek movie coming this summer, followed by Wonder Woman in 2017. His latest, The Finest Hours, came out Friday.
Stardom of this kind doesn’t come accidentally to anyone, but to talk to Pine is to realize that he truly thinks of it as a lark.
“I don’t even feel like I picked it,” Pine said in an interview. “I just started doing plays in college. And then I went to L.A. Then I got an agent. It just sort of rolled like a very slow snowball into what I’m doing now. It’s very weird.”
Pine did come from acting stock, however. His father, Robert Pine, is a journeyman working actor best known for CHiPs (Sgt. Getraer). His mother, Gwynne Gilford, was an actress, as was his grandmother, Anne Gwynne. Growing up in Los Angeles meant Pine was even closer to the business. He did production assistant work on Ryan Murphy’s show, Popular, and then on a Roger Corman television show on which his father worked.
“Just regular old nepotism,” Pine said, laughing.
But Pine is deeply serious about his profession, accidental or not.
In The Finest Hours, Pine plays a real-life hero who led an impossible U.S. Coast Guard mission in 1952 to rescue three dozen men who were stranded on a wrecked oil tanker that a terrible Nor’easter had torn in half. And it’s a bit of a departure for Pine.
The film is a nail-biting adventure, but Pine’s character, the late Bernie Webber, doesn’t exactly have the confidence of, say, Captain Kirk or some of the other cocksure extroverts the actor has played.
“Bernie struck me as someone who experienced great insecurity, anxiety, about his own ability and asked himself many times: ‘Am I good enough?’ ” Pine said. “If you’re human and alive, I think we’ve all felt that intensely at one point or another.”
To prepare, he listened to audio recordings of Webber to nail his New England accent. He studied his memoir and went out with the coast guard in Los Angeles to try to get a sense of their lives.
On set, too, director Craig Gillespie said Pine helped set the tone for the difficult shoot by being on time, prepared, and ready to bear anything — even being cold, wet and miserable for three months — with a sense of humour.
“He can be such a chameleon,” Gillespie said. “He has great comedic timing, and then he can be this leading hero with swagger and then he can do character stuff. Because he’s so handsome, sometimes that gets lost in the shuffle. But it really is amazing to see the nuances that he brings to his characters.”
Pine is excited about Star Trek Beyond, even without J.J. Abrams at the helm, and is over the Internet backlash that accompanied the first trailer.
“Seriously, who cares? How are we going to please everybody?” Pine said. “It’s too bad that they didn’t like it, but I’m pretty sure we made a great film.”
Pine is playing the male lead opposite Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman, one of the first modern era superhero films to be focused on a woman, which he’ll be shooting until late spring.
“It’s about time we have a strong female energy projected into the world,” Pine said.