Make sure you check out the interview in full over at USAToday.com

The franchise shot the actor to fame in 2009 when he took on Captain Kirk. And years after filming it, its co-writer delivered just the kind of meaty, dialogue-driven role Pine had been on the hunt for.

Filming the first Star Trek, “I was so focused on not (screwing) up that I just had blinders on to everything and everyone on set who was not in my direct path,” says Pine, who recalls meeting the film’s co-writer Alex Kurtzman briefly.

But then Kurtzman “called me up really out of the blue at home,” says Pine, 31, and he sent over a script for People Like Us (out Friday), a film inspired by Kurtzman and writing partner Roberto Orci’s own lives.
The script was packed with emotional minefields: an absentee father who’s hidden his adult love child, Frankie (Elizabeth Banks), from his son, Sam (Pine). A narcissistic, secretive mother (Michelle Pfeiffer). And a payload in the form of $150,000, left in Sam’s hands for Frankie upon their father’s death.

Pine signed on to the Kurtzman-directed dramedy within days. “I love the character,” he says of Sam, his cocky, fast-talking salesman. “I thought he was flawed and funny and dark but in a really human kind of dark way.”

Sam, an “epic plate-spinning, super-adroit cocktail-party chatterer,” is challenged with ditching his honed salesman shtick and facing his boxed-up past.

For Pine, the beauty in this family was in its flaws.

“What I loved about (the film), which was on the page, is that there are no golden pink bow ties by the end of the film,” he says. As his character navigates the waters after his father’s death and confronts the women in his life, including his hard-edged mother, Lillian (Pfeiffer), and his girlfriend (Olivia Wilde), “they all kind of still hate one another, and Sam doesn’t fully get along with his mom, (but) he chooses to love her for all of her faults. He and Frankie, they were all just kind of entering the town of people — almost becoming human to be like, ‘I’m screwed up, are you?’ That was kind of the message of it I liked.”