If you told anyone that he would play Captain Kirk and Jack Ryan, two of the greatest fictional men’s men ever created, before he was even out of his 30s, he’d consider that a pretty decent life return. But Los Angeles native Chris Pine isn’t content with just evading tractor beams and bringing down international spy rings. Oh no. Before seeing if the snug Enterprise uniforms still fit next year for JJ Abrams’ Star Trek sequel and rebooting Tom Clancy’s CIA badass on the big screen for the first time in eight years (working title: Moscow), the 30-year-old has joined forces with Hollywood royalty Denzel Washington and director Tony ‘Top Gun’ Scott to add ‘stopping an out-of-control, toxic cargo-carrying freight train’ to his CV. The big show-off.

Unstoppable looks an insurance company’s nightmare – how many stunts did you take on yourself? As many as I could. There’s a point where I’m riding between two cars in a pretty precarious position, and I was proud that I actually said yes to that. It was a thrill – it’s certainly pretty scary looking at a two-tonne train that’s going 40mph and realising that, even if the director yells ‘Cut!’, it’s doing its own thing.

Did they let you drive a real train?
No, thank God. LA is so crowded, I’d be worried I’d be the breaking story on the news.

Did Denzel show you which lever did what?
I tried to soak in as much as I could. You know, I have the best job in the world because I get paid to go to graduate acting school, and this was like having a seminar with one of the best. Is the US as full of train nerds as the UK? I’m not sure it’s as big as in the UK – I actually lived in Leeds in my year abroad at university. I lived on Brudenell Road and loved getting fat off pints of bitter – but there is definitely a ‘trainspotter’ community in the US.

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The creators of the 1980s primetime soap Dynasty are developing a big-screen adaptation of the series, as I was first to report yesterday.

Esther and Richard Shapiro’s flick would be a prequel centered on a young Blake Carrington and his first wife Alexis.

Well, I just chatted with the original ruthless and bitchy Alexis—Joan Collins!

Who does she think should play the young future oil moguls? Read on to find out…

For Alexis, Collins thinks onetime Bond Girl and new face of G-Star, Gemma Arterton, would be perfect.

“She has all the qualities that Alexis needs,” she exclusively told me from Birmingham, England, where she’s costarring in stage show Dick Whittington. “She’s sexy. She looks clever and she’s kind of vixenous.”

As for Blake (originally played by the late John Forsythe), Collins said, “I do think Chris Pine would be great as Blake. He’s a wonderful actor.”

Collins said she’d love to play Alexis again. “I certainly couldn’t play her in a prequel in the 1960s,” the 77-year-old Hollywood icon said, laughing. “But I always thought they should do it today with Alexis’ grandchildren, who about 20 years ago were five and six.”

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So it turns out Catwoman will be Captain Kirk’s mom.

That’s another way of saying Michelle Pfeiffer has landed the final big role in the upcoming DreamWorks drama Welcome to People, co-starring as Chris Pine’s widowed mother, EW has learned exclusively. The movie is about an estranged son who returns home for his father’s funeral and must sort through his dad’s secret life. Elizabeth Banks plays Pine’s alcoholic half-sister and Olivia Wilde has been cast as Pine’s girlfriend.

Welcome to People was written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (who teamed on the Transformers movies, Star Trek reboot and TV’s Fringe) and Jody Lambert, with Kurtzman taking on first-time directing duties. If there’s any confusion, given the stars and filmmakers, this is a family drama — no lasers, robots, or space ships.

It starts shooting next week in Los Angeles with plans for release next year.

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Tony Scott’s thriller Unstoppable starring Chris Pine and Denzel Washington has been cleared to depart for Blu-ray Disc and DVD on February 15th.

Unstoppable racked up just over $80 million at the domestic box office this past fall and over $137 million worldwide. It has helped solidify Chris Pine as a bankable action star in Hollywood.

Distributor Fox has yet to formally announce Unstoppable’s home video release (though may do so as early as later today) but multiple retailers are reporting the same release date. Without the announcement I don’t have any bonus features or additional information to share at this time.

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You can pre-order your very own copy of Unstoppable at Amazon.com for $27.99 (Blu-Ray) and $19.99 (DVD) by clicking the prices provided.

In an interview with today’s Herald-Sun Newspaper in Australia (to promote Unstoppable), rising superstar Chris Pine spoke briefly about his next gig, playing iniquitous CIA rookie Jack Ryan – the character played by sirs Baldwin, Ford and Affleck in The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger and The Sum Of All Fears – in Paramount’s Moscow.

The film, somewhat of a reboot of the franchise that kicked off in 1990 with Red October, will be directed by Lost alum Jack Bender. It was reportedly going to shoot as early as February this year. Seems not.

Asked by the lovely Neala Johnson whether or not he was prepared to be ’stacked up against those who have come before’, Pine replies assuredly “Look, at the end of the day, people will obviously prefer one version over the other, whether it be Alec Baldwin or Harrison Ford or Ben Affleck. I feel the same way about Star Trek – the only thing I can do is the best version of myself. I can only bring who I am to bear on the part and people either like that or not. Again, I don’t have much control over that, so all I can ask of myself is to do my best, try my hardest and to make sure that we have a really good story to tell, and then it to the hands of fate.”

Pine doesn’t know whether or not he’ll be doing anything as physical in the film as he did on Tony Scott’s Unstoppable.

“I dunno if any trains are gonna be involved”, the actor laughs. “I dunno what’s involved quite yet, I haven’t really seen the finished script, but some assorted running, for sure”.

In a recent interview with the delightful Katey Rich at Cinema Blend, producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura mentioned that the script for the film is currently undergoing a rewrite and as yet, there’s no set date for filming.

“We’re going to shoot in the spring. There’s no set date. It’s a slow process of figuring out how much it’s going to cost and all that stuff. [It’s] the same story– [Anthony Peckham] is going to bring his own particular flair to it. It is the origin story of Jack Ryan. Where you pick him up in his career is very true to what Clancy had as his backstory. You can explore some of the backstory you never had in previous movie. That will be fun for Clancy fan, and for an audience that hasn’t seen [the previous films], or seen them all in theaters. Chris Pine is going to make a great Jack Ryan. We really lucked out there.”

In Moscow, Ryan (Pine) will be fresh out of the Marines and gets himself involved in some sort of financial scandal in Russia. Apparently Wall Street plays a big part in the movie.

HE HASN’T even been in the business a decade yet, but Chris Pine has had his fair share of horror auditions.

I had one casting director stop me and say, ‘All right, now do it again and make me believe you’,” he recalls with a traumatised laugh.

“That was half of what she said, but also the tone that I can’t really recreate. It was just about the most miserable feeling on the planet.

“I just interpreted that as like, ‘OK, stop sucking, and try to be talented’.

“At that point you’ve lost, at that point it becomes not about the material at all, it becomes about your personal beef, and that’s never what it should be.

“The audition room is one of the most awkward, uncomfortable places to be, period. I don’t even know how producers do it, quite honestly.”

But an actor’s gotta do what an actor’s gotta do.

“Yup,” agrees Pine, “par for the course. Born masochist.”

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