Farragut North was written for the stage by Beau Willimon, who drew inspiration for the political drama from his experiences working on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign back in 2004. Clooney has been working with Willimon to adapt the play to the big screen for nearly three years now.

Pine would star in the role of spinmeister/wunderkind Stephen Myers, a shrewd political campaigner who is working to get his candidate nominated during the Iowa Democratic caucuses. The young man’s attempts are complicated by the efforts of an investigative journalist and a teenage intern – the latter of which Myers has an affair with. Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood are in talks to play the respective roles.

Leonardo DiCaprio was at one point attached to play the role of Myers, but that is no longer the case. Pine was widely praised for his portrayal of the character in an L.A. production of Farragut North last year (see below) and has seen his star meter in Hollywood rise significantly since – needless to say, he seems all but a perfect choice to play Myers in Clooney’s adaptation as well.

Chris Pine Farragut North movie George Clooney

Clooney already has two credible indie actors onboard to star in Farragut North as well: Philip Seymour Hoffman, who will play Myers’ boss, and Paul Giamatti, in the role of a rival candidate’s campaign manager. The politician Myers works for is never seen in the original play, but will have a short appearance in the film version and may be brought to life by Clooney himself.

Sony is currently holding negotiations with Clooney to distribute the pic, which will most likely be an independent production. The combination of a high-caliber cast and Clooney at the helm should be sufficient to attract the attention of financiers to fund the project.

We will keep you updated on the development of Farragut North as more news comes in.

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Gallery Link: On Stage – Play Photos > Farragut North ( 2009 )

“Farragut North,” Beau Willimon’s engaging drama about the dirty tricks and brutal backstabbing of those conducting the spin war for aspiring presidents, attempts to reignite our tapped-out passion for political one-upmanship. The play, which is having its West Coast premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, may not be able to compete with the loony stranger-than-fiction cast of recent election battles or offer us any stop-the-presses scoops about our Swift Boat campaign culture, but it does capture the frenzied scheming and counter-scheming of would-be Washington kingmakers.

Better yet, the production has a rising superstar on board who could give Barack Obama a run for his charismatic money. Chris Pine, the paparazzi’s current object of affection after his breakout role as Capt. James T. Kirk in the new “Star Trek” film, stars as Stephen Bellamy, a 25-year-old press secretary for a Democratic presidential candidate who remains an invisible presence throughout. Imagine Karl Rove as a fit, chicly dressed media strategist for the other side and you have some idea of the nature of this latest boy genius.

A morality tale about an attractively malign central character, “Farragut North” is as much about what drives Stephen’s merciless pursuit of victory as it is about the way political machinations have eclipsed what’s really at stake in our elections. As a character study of a “crackberry” generation mover-and-shaker, who lives a life of wall-to-wall work (with scheduled barroom binges and hotel room dalliances), the play has a fresh accuracy that suggests the playwright, who worked for both Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York and Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, was taking juicy notes on the campaign trail.

But the drama doesn’t concentrate its energies as satisfyingly as it might. Willimon tries (and mostly succeeds) in staying one step ahead of the audience with his foxy plot. Yet this hectic legerdemain distracts from character development, and the result is that even such crucial figures as Paul Zara, Stephen’s battle-hardened boss, who’s played by Chris Noth (a.k.a. Mr. Big from “Sex and the City”), and Molly, the 19-year-old sexually assertive campaign intern, who’s played by the entrancing Olivia Thirlby (“Juno”), can seem like functions of Stephen’s story more than fleshed-out figures in their own right.

Set in Des Moines, Iowa, weeks before the state’s caucuses will officially commence, the play begins — where else? — in a booth at a bar. Stephen is holding court with Paul, Ida Horowicz (Mia Barron), a New York Times journalist who’s as professionally manipulative as she is easily manipulated, and Ben (Dan Bittner), an earnest deputy press secretary whose idealism hasn’t yet been contaminated by the ugly reality around him.

This opening scene sets up expectations that these ruthless talkers, who are cackling over the way Stephen once pinned the anti-Semitic label on a rival candidate, are operating in a David Mamet universe. But the production, directed by Doug Hughes (who also staged the attractive new revival of “Oleanna” at the Mark Taper Forum), treats the play more like a topical David Hare drama in which the compromises of private conscience and the debasement of public values are seen as inextricably linked to each other.

Willimon subtly introduces a snowballing complication into the plot when Stephen meets Tom Duffy (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), the campaign manager for a rival candidate, at a dingily discreet restaurant. A furtive job offer sets off a squall of intrigue in which all parties are implicated in a contest of professional sabotage.

But this story line is just a useful device. The riveting interest is always Pine’s seductive double-talk, the way he maniacally stirs up trouble whenever he feels the heat from his incessantly moaning phone. There’s a reason his Stephen is so adroit at his job — a genially handsome exterior conceals a ruthlessly Machiavellian interior. He’s upfront about his moral shortcomings, but somehow that only adds to his lethal charm. Molly, who’s no old-fashioned purist, can’t help wishing that this sad, self-made dreamboat was made of better stuff. Pine coaxes us into falling into the same sinister trap.

This well-acted Atlantic Theater Company production includes several members from the original off-Broadway company, including Noth, who presents a flabby, middle-aged reflection of who Stephen will become if he doesn’t get out of this awful racket. It’s a well-knit ensemble that has little difficulty with the play’s rapid pulse.

The sets by David Korins aren’t particularly eye-catching, but then the locations aren’t supposed to be five-star. Joshua White and Bec Stupak’s video collages of TV news clips and election sights and sounds don’t add much to the visual palette, but they do keep the staging’s motor revved.

The strength of “Farragut North,” however, lies in the reflex duplicity that marks Stephen’s dealing with everyone in his orbit, particularly Molly. She may not be a fully formed character, but as portrayed by Thirlby with a tricky mix of guile and naivete, this jean-clad pixie is perhaps the only one with any chance to teach Stephen about the limits of work and the necessity of trust.

source: latimes.com

The cast of “Farragut North” poses for a group photo at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles Tuesday, June 23, 2009. From left, front row, are Isiah Whitlock Jr., Chris Noth, Olivia Thirlby and Chris Pine. Back, from left, are Justin Huen, director Doug Hughes, writer Beau Willimon, Mia Barron and Dan Bittner.

Gallery Link: Photo Sessions > Session #027

Pine, 28, costars with ” Sex and the City’s” Chris Noth as media massagers in the psychological drama inspired by Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, which briefly claimed the energies of the playwright and recovering politico Beau Willimon. Pine plays Stephen, a wunderkind press secretary who prides himself on his ability to manipulate any situation.

At the moment, Stephen is trying to work his magic on an attractive young intern played by ” Juno’s” Olivia Thirlby, who was in the New York production’s original cast last fall. In a Geffen rehearsal room, under the watchful eye of director Doug Hughes (who also helmed the current Mark Taper Forum production of David Mamet’s “Oleanna”), Molly/Olivia has just entered to drop off an envelope for Stephen/Chris at a dingy restaurant in East Des Moines, Iowa, where he’s making calls. And now he’s trying to beguile her into sticking around for a drink.

The characters play a flirtatious game of verbal ping-pong, and then Pine suddenly mimes reeling in Thirlby as if she’s on the end of an invisible hook. Hughes is delighted. “Your silver-tongued eloquence claims another helpless victim,” he says.


Pine’s smile grows even broader. “It’s just another day, Doug,” he replies.

Pine may be self-mocking when he says that, but then that’s part of the charm that got him into this enviable position in the first place. Directors and writers who’ve worked with him quickly volunteer that he’s a great guy to have around, not an overgrown enfant terrible like so many other young lions of Hollywood who will go unnamed.

When “Star Trek” director J.J. Abrams cast him in the pivotal role of Capt. Kirk, the filmmaker was looking for “a relative unknown who had to behave as if he were an experienced movie star without any of the negatives of being a big movie star,” he said. “He had to treat the cast and crew in a way that would make the other actors feel safe and the crew feel appreciated. And he was impeccable.”

Add a wicked sense of humor and piercing blue eyes, and it’s easy to see how Pine has burst onto the scene as one of the action heroes of summer. What may be less obvious is why he took the dark and relatively low-profile stage role of Stephen, who personifies “Farragut North’s” catchphrase that it’s a play “about the lust for power and the costs one will endure to achieve it.” (Warner Bros. is developing the film version, with Leonardo DiCaprio attached to star and George Clooney to direct.)

“I was in a hotel room with my girlfriend at the time, and I had a bunch of scripts to read — film and theater — and I saved it for last because I’d heard it was really good, and I wanted to end my night on a good note, being excited,” Pine says of his early-spring decision to take the part during a lull in the “Star Trek” publicity grind. “I couldn’t put it down. The twist at the end completely threw me. I thought Beau’s sense of dialogue was so right on and so — I don’t want to say real, because that’s dumb — but real without being affected, and intelligent, but not so intelligent to make you feel like a dumbass. And I’m very interested in the world of politics, so it appealed to me on that end.”

As Pine discusses the play during a break in rehearsal at the Geffen, his mind and body seem to be in constant motion. He alternately scratches his side and reaches for the coffee table as he mulls over certain questions, waiting for the right answer to finish percolating. He’s casually dressed in a blue button-down shirt, black jeans and high-top sneakers and a new beard. The facial fuzz was inspired by Willimon’s hirsute college buddy and political mentor, Jay Carson, who worked for Hillary and Bill and, at only 26, served as Dean’s national spokesman in 2004.

Pine is trying on the beard to see if it helps him penetrate Stephen’s miserable je ne sais quoi. He acknowledges that he’s not quite there yet.

“I’m having a hard time not judging him,” he says. “But there’s a primal drive in him to win at all costs that I’m coming to understand. That need comes from all the damage that all of us carry in one form or another. It’s just his ability to screw other people over, it’s that Machiavellian politician in him. . . . Once I can pinpoint that, I’ll be able to take it, hopefully, to a different level. But it sure is a lot of fun.”

Not just guy candy

In fact, the dark Stephen is just as much a typical Chris Pine role as the stellar Kirk is. His brief career has already swept the spectrum of characters, from heroes to antiheroes.

And for the most part, the dividing line is the one that separates film and theater.

Pine’s first big-screen role was as an arm charm for Anne Hathaway in 2004′s “Princess Diaries 2,” a service he also provided Lindsay Lohan’s character in 2006 in “Just My Luck.” He quickly moved on to the young hero role in the 2008 film ” Bottle Shock,” in which, as with “Star Trek,” he played a hapless young man who tries to live up to his father’s legacy (a scion of the family business much like Pine himself, the son of “CHiPs” veteran Robert Pine and TV actress Gwynne Gilford, and a third-generation thespian from what he calls “a working-class Hollywood” family, presumably because they literally worked).

Yet one of Pine’s favorite film roles was not a lead but rather the “redneck neo-Nazi hit man” of 2006′s “Smokin’ Aces.” And while he was becoming better known for his good-guy film parts, he was earning critics’ notice in much darker roles onstage, such as the vicious Carter in Neil LaBute’s “Fat Pig” at the Geffen in 2007 and the amoral journalist of Ronan Noone’s 2006 one-man drama “The Atheist” in New York.

Of Pine’s work in “Fat Pig,” LaBute says: “He had what I felt would have worked for either of the male characters in that piece — the good guy or the bad guy. He had a watchability. I think he isn’t looking at [his career situation] as, ‘I have this chance of being a star.’ He knows a good role is a good role, and if it’s a bad guy, they often get the best lines. It’s great to see him going off to do a piece of theater. He’s approaching it as, ‘What is the best material I have at the moment?’ “

Willimon thinks the pattern of Pine’s acting credits reflects the opportunities available to a young guy with leading-man looks, and “it doesn’t have as much to do with Chris Pine as it does with the chasm between theater and film,” he says. “In general, film — particularly Hollywood films — tend to lean more toward the good hero who overcomes obstacles and comes out on top. Theater, largely because it doesn’t bear the same commercial burden that film does, has the luxury and the bravery to take on risks and support the other sort of heroes — call it the antihero. Sometimes obstacles do not result in a happy ending — or a more complex ending than triumph.”

In August, Pine moves on to his own happy ending when he starts filming 20th Century Fox’s “Unstoppable” with Denzel Washington. In the thriller directed by Tony Scott, he and Washington will play conductors trying to stop a runaway train carrying toxic chemicals. It’s probably reasonable to assume that there are a couple of hero roles in there somewhere.

Pine seems gobsmacked about the opportunity to work with the two-time Oscar winner, an experience he anticipates will be tantamount to earning an acting PhD. “I don’t ever want to be so precious to eschew those kinds of roles because I’m on some mission to be the artiste in Hollywood,” says Pine, who credits his family with keeping his feet on the ground. “But I think there’s a closeted Peter Lorre inside me that loves to play the fun, darker, weirder roles that hopefully I’ll get the chance to play as I move ahead in my career.”

source: latimes.com

At that point in the interview, Chris Pine walked into the room. The 28-year-old actor, who plays Stephen and appeared two years ago at the Geffen in a production of Neil Labute’s “Fat Pig,” is a lot more in demand these days as a result of his much-praised portrayal of the young James T. Kirk in the just-released big-screen blockbuster “Star Trek.”

“This guy is tremendous,” Noth said of Pine. “He’s really good at it; brings all kinds of dimensions to the role. He was born to be onstage.”

You can read the entire article & interview with Chris Noth here @OC Register.com

Gallery Link: On Stage – Play Photos > Farragut North ( 2009 )

And people were indeed watching. He caught the attention of a Paramount Pictures exec who attended the Geffen Playhouse production. And Paramount was soon to be in need of a young Captain James T. Kirk.

Also in the Geffen audience were the director and CD in need of actors for 2008′s Bottle Shock. They nabbed Pine for the little film about an upstart Napa Valley winery in the sleepy 1970s, in which he was unrecognizable as a sunny hippie, the antithesis of his LaBute character. Playing opposite Alan Rickman in Bottle Shock, Pine apparently did what he is doing to this day: He spent his off time discussing theater. As Rickman last year recalled from their time on the set, “Chris and I talked and still do talk about theater and things he wants to do in the theater, which is reassuring in terms of somebody who just finished doing Star Trek and is about to have all that’s going to land on him through that—that he’s still got his eye fixed on a different horizon, or a parallel horizon. He’s a serious, and really talented, actor.”

Yes, the publicity and fan adoration from Star Trek has landed squarely on Pine. Nice, but seemingly not his goal in life. When Back Stage spoke with him, he was into the second day of rehearsals, back at the Geffen Playhouse, working on a lead role in Beau Willimon’s Farragut North. As Pine says, “At the end of the day, I want a long career, and I want a career made up of many and diverse roles.” The 28-year-old is well on his way.

Roots Wide and Deep

Pine comes from a family of actors. His father is Robert Pine; his mother is Gwynne Gilford, a child of actors. The young Pine had wanted to play sports, but as a self-described late bloomer, that was not to be. During Pine’s student days at U.C. Berkeley, a friend suggested he audition for a production of an obscure Irish play. Pine won the role and played about 20 different characters—using different dialects, playing women and old men. His parents, he says, were proud and supportive. They were also wondering how he’d like the fallow periods of an acting career.

Pine says that growing up in Los Angeles in a family of actors, he had no “romantic visions” about the financial aspects and the artistic aspects of acting. As he noted then, and now, “There is unfortunately no correlation between hard work and success, and the word deserve has no place in the acting business, unfortunately.”

He watched his parents continue to study acting and his mother to teach. Pine would tag along and help coach her students. A stickler for technique, as he terms her, she gave him birthday and Christmas gifts of books by Boleslavsky, Stanislavsky, Michael Chekhov, Uta Hagen, Stella Adler. He recalls, “I was passionate about it, insofar as I’m a perfectionist and very hard on myself. So I read them more out of thinking I should read all of these before I get into it—and then talking it out with my mother and working on scenes.”

One of Pine’s online biographies states he studied at American Conservatory Theater. “No, my biography is all the lies that I made up when I began and had to make up a résumé,” he says. In truth, his Berkeley professor was an adjunct at ACT. Pine took one acting class in college; “the rest of the time it was just experiential,” performing in plays throughout the year. Later he studied with Ivana Chubbuck, Howard Fine, and recently with Nancy Banks and Sandra Seacat.

But after college, he returned to Los Angeles and, he says, “was very lucky.” His father, on an audition for Gilmore Girls, asked casting directors Jami Rudofsky and Mara Casey if they would help out his son. They did. “These ladies are the best, and I owe them a tremendous amount,” says Pine. They brought him in for a guest spot, and he went to producers. He didn’t get the part. But he got his first taste of being in the room—with CDs, with producers, even with other actors. “I think many times there’s stuff that no acting school will ever teach you, and you just have to be a self-aware artist,” says Pine. “Sitting in an audition room can be the most destructive experience ever, so you have to know how you operate. If it does you a service to talk to another actor in the room, to get comfortable and loosen up, then great. But if that dissipates your energy, if that makes you feel competitive, you have to be very vigilant—the combative egos that happen in an audition room that can come across as quite nice and quite approachable. You just have to be conscious of that. All great learning stuff.”

Making Luck Happen

So the unemployed Pine began working at a restaurant, which he says he “just abhorred with every ounce of my being and soul.” It galvanized him. Apparently the brutality of pilot season was far preferable. It was time to find an agent. And that came easily. He openly recognizes the part luck—”call it nepotism,” he says—played in that process. Craft played a huge part, too. Even today he articulately discusses technique, still happy to have an ever-growing bag of tools but not leaning too heavily on anything striking him as extraneous or forced or too intellectual.

The “luck” that brought him agents had begun percolating when Pine did a season at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. As he recollects, the associate producer at the time, Jenny Gersten, took a liking to him and secured him a general with a network head of casting. The exec referred him to talent agents at SDB Partners, as did Casey and Rudofsky. Ah, but his father was with a similarly named commercial agency, so young Pine thought there was a mixup and never called.

Meanwhile, he recalls, “I had had a series of really awful, debilitating meetings with agencies. I’m sure many of the actors reading this magazine will attest to the fact that when you’re in a position of powerlessness and someone has power, depending on the person you’re meeting with, either there’s empathy there or there’s use of power that is completely heinous. I have a couple names in my pocket and a couple memories that serve me very well.”

The head of casting came into the restaurant where Pine was working and asked if he had contacted SDB. Pine revealed his confusion over names. The persistent exec emailed SDB on the spot, Pine had an audition about a week later, “did a scene for them, and then they called me up and took me on; again, very lucky.” Pine is still represented by SDB. He says, “This is what I’ll say about that: I’m a firm believer in loyalty. At the end of the day, this is a business, and you are a business, and I have felt in my career it has served me to stay with the people who started with me because I believe they’re as passionate and as dedicated as they’ve ever been. But to each his own.”

The Young Voyager

Pine got his pilot season in, winding up with a few lines on ER to add to his résumé. And then he returned to Williamstown for a second season. “Pilot season had not gone well,” he says. “So I decided to move to New York after reading this article in Vanity Fair about Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall living together and doing this starving-artist thing, and I was just determined to be a starving artist at any cost.” Pine gave up his apartment and stayed in New York for a few weeks, “just taking in the New York scene, which I felt to be more exciting artistically than I felt L.A. was, and that was just because I hadn’t really found the theater scene in L.A., which doesn’t take hunting but it’s just more—you have to be more determined.”

He returned to Los Angeles to explain to his agents his plan for poverty. “And as things always seem to work out once you let go, I let go completely, my auditions started to really click, and I went into the room feeling empowered,” he says. He booked two guest spots: on CSI: Miami and on The Guardian. “I played a serial rapist-killer on CSI, and I played this kind of latchkey homeless orphan kid a couple sandwiches short of a picnic on The Guardian, playing real characters—and I say characters in quotes. And then I got this role playing the love interest in The Princess Diaries 2, which was the last thing I expected to get, because I had just come from playing the serial rapist and the latchkey kid.”

Feet on the Ground

The rest of Pine’s career has thoroughly been reported by the world’s press. He takes his current media status sensibly and kindly: “If the worst thing that happens in your life is that you’re asked the same question repeatedly for a month, and people look very interested while they’re talking to you and wanting to know about you, think about every day you worked at that restaurant and every day you worked as a delivery man for Domino’s, every day you were a host, every day you were a bartender and worked until 4 a.m. And then just be very grateful.”

Pine is now happily immersed in Farragut North, preparing for a June 24 opening as the play’s central figure. Pine plays Stephen, a young overachieving press secretary working for a presidential candidate. Stephen may be gifted and decisive, but he’s human. Cleverly manipulated, he stumbles and falls under the massive wheels of politics as usual.

Apparently not often without a pile of scripts to consider, Pine says that when he read this one, he thought, “Goddamn, that’s a piece of writing.” Then he lovingly patted it and set it down. “It took me for such a great ride,” he recalls. “And I love the character, I love the hubris, I love the whole idea of this guy who’s like a lion in his den, just taking up space and owning it in the beginning and by the end is this caged animal desperate to get back to his position of power. And I was scared of it, which like anyone will tell you, once you feel that thing, you’d better jump into it headfirst.” He was even more scared when he realized he had only one week of rehearsal and one week of tech. But the years in Williamstown are serving him well.

Not scared was the playwright. Says Willimon, “I could tell from the first moment I met him that he was perfect for the role. And that’s only proven to be the case.” Willimon had not seen Pine on stage, so the scribe turned to others for their opinions and recollections of Pine—including Geffen artistic director Randall Arney, directors and others at Williamstown, and Farragut’s director, Doug Hughes. “It’s not very often that you get an unequivocal, 100 percent unanimous, ‘This guy is amazing, a pleasure to work with, has such a raw and deep talent, and you have to get him to do your play if you can,’ ” Willimon reports.

Pine, who in his younger days felt marking up a script in prescribed fashion couldn’t serve him, has now marked Farragut’s script until it’s unintelligible. As when he performed in Ronan Noone’s one-man The Atheist Off-Broadway in 2006, Pine calculated how long he had to memorize. “I knew I wanted to be off book by the time rehearsal started,” he says. “I usually don’t like to do it that way. I like to go into rehearsal and find it organically, and by the time week three comes around, you basically know the lines, and then you spend a week and a half solidifying, and then you’re good. But I knew I had to spend that week doing the actor stuff and not worrying about lines.” He is also working with two coaches on the role, “someone that I could jam with, that I was on the same page with, that was not a slave to technique but rather had a tool bag themselves.”

Currently, the actor is getting timelines down, creating backstories about particular moments, thinking about the quality and length of relationships, particularly with the character played by Pine’s co-star Chris Noth. “Certainly it’s like Acting 101,” Pine reflects. “Anytime there’s a dash after a sentence, or an ellipsis, you’d better know what you’re about to say, for your own sake, because if your fellow actor doesn’t cut you off at the right time, you’d better have something coming out of your mouth. For phone calls, you’d better know what’s happening on the other end, otherwise you’re not hearing and reacting.”

With Hughes, Pine is simultaneously considering the central question of who Stephen is and a little piece of backstory and a secret to justify the play’s crucial moment. “I couldn’t really justify it to myself,” says Pine. “It was something very nebulous, like it’s very gratifying that someone might want to meet with you. I can’t play ‘gratifying to my ego.’ It has to be something more specific to me that essentially gets at that same thing but comes at it from a different angle to be as vague about it as possible. That’s the crux of the play. So I’d better sell it and understand what the hell is going on there, for sure.”

Whether rehearsals are focusing on the first scene—with its clipped, overlapping dialogue and the technical challenges of also eating and drinking and making that spontaneous—or whether Pine is pondering Stephen’s attraction to a young intern, played by Olivia Thirlby, the actor is focused on making his work specific, real, fresh, nuanced—all in the shortened rehearsal schedule. And meanwhile, although actors must “feel in the moment and whatever grabs you,” he says, even that must be tempered so you don’t throw your fellow actors off during a performance. Pine says he also wants to feel ownership over Farragut North’s language, beyond its sheer volume of dialogue. As he says, “There’s always something to learn. You always want to be better. Always. You want perfection. That’s the quest. I’m positive I’ll never get there, but that’s the goal.”

Farragut North runs June 24–July 26 at the Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave., L.A. Tickets: (310) 208-5454 or www.geffenplayhouse.com.

source: Backstage.com

We were lucky to see the first night preview Tuesday night of the play Farragut North at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles with Chris starring along side an all star cast including Chris Noth, Olivia Thrilby, Isiah Whitlock, Jr., Mia Barron, Dan Bittmer and Justin Huen. We won’t give you any spoliers, but Chris Noth surprised us as the political boss, and we loved the sparks that flew between Chris Pine and Olivia during their sexy love scenes!

The theater was packed and the crowd cheered loudly for Chris as he took his bow at the end of the show. And who could blame them? We definitely enjoyed seeing Chris dressed up in hottie suits on stage. The entire cast joined the young theater patrons at an private event after the show, and RadarOnline.com spotted Chris chatting with lots of excited fans.

But he’s not raking in the big bucks in this show. Although he’s starring in the biggest hit of the summer, our theather friends tell RadarOnline.com that the Star Trek stud did this play as a “labor of love,” and was paid favored nation status – which means that everyone in the cast made the same amount of money and our sources tell us this was NOT a big paycheck at all.

So why do we like Chris in this play so much? All we can say is you don’t get to see Captain Kirk strip down to his boxer briefs in Star Trek!

Thanks so much to Chris Alexander of RadarOnline for sending this to me!
source: radaronline.com