CHRIS PINE ON
Chris Pine has yellow paint flecked on the thigh of his white jeans. It’s one of the first things you notice when he walks into the room, but he looks down in surprise when asked about it, as if he’s taken aback it’s there at all.
It turns out he’s an enthusiastic artist and was just working on his latest effort.
“I’m not great, but I love it,” Pine, 38, says bashfully.
To his chagrin, he has been navigating a number of questions about what has been going on below his waist in recent weeks.
Pine’s latest film Outlaw King sees the Los Angeles-born star play the legendary Scottish warrior Robert the Bruce.
When the movie had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, many of the first reviews included panting references to his full-frontal nudity.
“People are giggling about my penis as if we’re schoolchildren,” he says ruefully. “There are movies with people sawing their heads off and you can show that to a 13-year-old in my country and it’s not a problem.
Showing intimacy is forbidden but showing violence gets a thumbs up
You show two people having sex and your mother’s got to hide you from it. And if you distil that down, there’s something about showing intimacy which is verboten, but showing violence which is thumbs up.”
The scene in question actually occurs when Robert the Bruce emerges from a lake after a bath, having seized the Scottish crown during the oppressive occupation of medieval Scotland by English King Edward I.
But it has led to a lot of innuendo and sniggering, while the nudity of Florence Pugh, who plays Robert’s wife Elizabeth, has gone largely unremarked-upon.
“In exploring this kind of man who is to be called king and treated like a king, I thought it was important to see the king and the animal, the man and the animal – that his feet are in the mud.
“That he is both violent and primitive and bestial, but also something else.
“So I thought to see the human de-clothed and as his animal self is really important. But Florence shows her entire body in this film and no one is talking about that.
“People want to talk about my penis as if we’re a bunch of teenagers playing spin the bottle.
“Is Florence expected to do that because she is a woman and I’m not expected to do that because I’m a man?
“Certainly, there’s a lot of violence in
this film and people get debowelled and stuff like that, and no one wants to talk about that.
“And I think it’s certainly a marker of our puritanical culture where, if people make love or show what God gave us, it’s somehow NC-17 [adult-rated] and you can debowel, behead... you can do all sorts of crazy sh*t like that and people are like, ‘yeah that seems right’. Let’s put