You can check out the interview in full over at USATODAY.COM

“It’s always a bit overwhelming,” admits Pine, 32. “What I do know is my job is to do my best to bring whatever new colors I have to these franchises.”

In Jack Ryan, directed by Kenneth Branagh, Pine takes the character to its beginning, where the injured Marine is recruited by CIA vet Kevin Costner to work as a high-level analyst. The two are pitted against a Russian oligarch (played by Branagh) who is pulling the strings of the financial market and delving into international terrorism with potential global catastrophic results.

The Russian angle might sound like classic Clancy, who set his novels during and in the shadow of the Cold War. But this original story has been brought to the present.

“We cheated a little,” says Branagh. “Mr. Clancy is very aware of and very behind the concept, but we put Jack Ryan in the here and now.”

“We take the fundamentals of the myth of Jack Ryan and do an original film that was never a book,” says Pine. “We’re making our own story in a modern-day 2013.”

Of vital importance for Pine was keeping Ryan very much the everyman, with his greatest asset being his analytical brain.

“He doesn’t drive great cars, he doesn’t know five different martial arts,” says Pine. “He works in the CIA, but he’s a normal guy with a normal wife (fiancée, actually) thrown into these extraordinary circumstances.”

Costner’s character “shows him right away that it’s not physical prowess or shooting a gun that’s Jack’s weapon, but it’s how smart he is,” adds Pine.