It’s Jack & thrill
ON THE FIRST day of filming “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” a chaotic action sequence set in the midst of Manhattan’s Financial District, star Chris Pine suddenly realized he was acting opposite the Kevin Costner.
The Kevin Costner that he grew up watching on the big screen in “Field of Dreams” and “Bull Durham.”
“You always have these outof-body moments on the set where you’re like, ‘ My God I watched these people growing up, I’ve seen tons of their films and now I’ve got to work opposite them,” said Pine of working with actors like Costner or Denzel Washington in 2010’s “Unstoppable.”
“But what kicks in very quickly is the shock and awe goes to, ‘I have to do this job’ and I have to step up to the plate and be at the same level as these guys or they’re going to run me over.”
If the mentor-student relationship between Pine’s titular newbie CIA analyst Ryan and his agency handler Thomas Handler (Costner) seemed particularly authentic on-screen, that’s because it extended off-screen, too. The thriller, which opens Friday, the fifth movie based on the popular character created by late novelist Tom Clancy, is a passing of the baton between two generations of leading men.
“You can’t help but be mentored by someone with that amount of experience,” says Pine, 33, who is just getting used to the idea of being a leading man after two tours of duty aboard the bridge in “Star Trek.”
The soon-to-be 59-year-old Costner, of course, has some ex- perience in that department. His main piece of advice? Never try to upstage the scenery-chewing villain. In “Shadow Recruit,” that honor goes to director Kenneth Branagh, who also plays a sociopathic Russian businessman out to sabotage the U.S. economy.
“No one likes a know-it-all, but I let Chris know that a lot of times when you’re playing a leading man you don’t get the lisp and the limp and you don’t get to do all the fun character things, because sometimes they can be incredibly distracting,” Costner told The News. “I don’t think leading men should be called leading men, they should be called supporting actors, because they are the only person who can support all of the other characters in the movie.”
Costner should know: he would have been Jack Ryan if a scheduling conflict hadn’t torpedoed his chance to star in 1990’s “The Hunt for Red October.” The role instead went to Alec Baldwin.
“I offered Kevin Costner the Jack Ryan part for ‘Hunt for Red October’ right after I optioned the book,” says producer Mace Neu- feld. “We finished doing ‘No Way Out’ together and Kevin thanked me for offering it to him, but he was working on this Western and he thought he had it financed — that was his primary goal. “And of course he made the right choice, because that turned out to be ‘Dances With Wolves,’” for which Costner won two Academy Awards.