As Captain James T. Kirk in the rebooted big-screen “Star Trek” franchise, Chris Pine has taken up the Shatnerian mantle in two blockbuster films and boldly gone where no one has gone before. In the galaxy that is Hollywood, however, after you’ve played a hero like Kirk, it can be tricky to go anywhere else.

“Once the business sees you in a certain light, they want to capitalize on that,” said Pine, 34. “You have to go out of your way to let people know you’re interested in doing other things.”

With a pair of wildly different — and decidedly un-“Trek”-like — roles in upcoming releases, Pine is letting the world know just that. In the R-rated comedy sequel “Horrible Bosses 2,” opening Nov. 26, he plays Rex, a slick, amoral corporate tool who becomes ensnared by three dimwitted friends (played by Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and Charlie Day) in a horribly botched kidnapping plot. A month later, Pine will costar with Meryl Streep, Anna Kendrick and Johnny Depp in the Dec. 25 adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim fairy-tale fantasy musical “Into the Woods,” playing Cinderella’s Prince.

On the face of it, Pine, who has done few outright comedies, seems an unlikely choice for “Horrible Bosses 2,” which follows the 2011 hit. But when director Sean Anders was co-writing the script, he remembered seeing a then largely unknown Pine on stage in a 2007 production of the darkly comic Neil LaBute play “Fat Pig,” playing a character every bit as coldblooded as Rex.

“Let’s face it: Most for lack of a better word ‘pretty-boy’ actors don’t have the chops that a lot of the comedy guys have,” Anders said. “But every now and then a guy like Alec Baldwin or Jon Hamm comes along. I knew Chris was one of those guys.”

Pine didn’t see Rex as dastardly so much as damaged. “What interested me about him was that he wasn’t just a bad guy for bad guy’s sake,” Pine said. “He was a kid who wanted his dad [played by Christoph Waltz] to love him, but he continually kicked him to the curb and created this sociopath.”

“Into the Woods” is an equally surprising pick for the actor. The extent of his singing background? “In high school, I once sang ‘Let’s Get It On’ and ‘Brown Sugar’ with a band that included my English teacher and my math teacher,” said Pine.

The industry might want to put him in the action-oriented leading man box, but Pine is clearly just as happy, if not happier, exploring more unexpected corners, even if that means his name isn’t always at the top of the call sheet.

“Sometimes it’s nice not to have to do the heavy lifting,” he said. When it comes to his career, he added, “I kind of take it as it comes.”

Even a Starship captain takes his hand off the wheel once in a while.

Source: latimes.com

Cinderella’s Prince (Chris Pine)
Pay close attention to Pine’s perfect hair as his prince careens through the woods. ”I sat in the makeup chair, and we started playing around with hairstyles,” said the actor. ”I said, ‘What if he had this weird Elvis pompadour, always coiffed and absurdly too big?”’ He continues, ”There’s something laughable about him. He’s very gallant, but you just want him to also be, like, a douche.’

Source: ew.com

USAToday.com — What goes around comes around, except when it takes a wacky detour.

Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis each suffered under abusive employers in the 2011 black comedy hit Horrible Bosses.

But now the fortunes have turned as the gang is back together in Horrible Bosses 2, opening Nov. 26 with a trailer hitting the Internet today. This time they are the managers from hell, but in the most inept way possible.

“It turns out we’re pretty horrible at being bosses and running a business,” says Day. “We’re hiring people for the wrong reasons, and not firing people for the wrong reasons. And then we have our business stolen.”

The work situation looks promising for the three inept pals in this new chapter directed by Sean Anders. They stumble upon an invention called The Shower Buddy — mixing shower water, shampoo and soap in one go — which attracts father-son investors played by Christoph Waltz and Chris Pine.

It’s only when the bumbling trio get their business act together that they find out their investors have swindled them — news delivered on the ninth green of a golf course.

“That’s when we find out we got duped,” says Day. “To make up for the injustice we dip our toes into the waters of illegal behavior. Once we open up Pandora’s Box again, it spirals out of control, and comedy ensues.”

In the first film (which earned a respectable $117.5 million, according to Box Office Mojo), the group set out to kill their employers after getting bad advice from a big-talking criminal, played by the scene-stealing Jamie Foxx. He returns in an expanded role, advising the crew in a plot to take Pine’s character hostage to ransom back the company.

The original film’s bad boss Kevin Spacey, now in prison for his business crimes, gets a visit from the three for advice — “he’s not to happy to see us,” says Day. Jennifer Aniston returns as the sexual predator dentist Dr. Julia Harris, an audacious role that inspired Pine.

“She’s pretty out-there,” he says.

But it’s Pine and Waltz who bring the true malevolence in this sequel, a specialty for Waltz since 2009’sInglourious Basterds.

“We’re pretty awful,” says Pine. “But (Waltz) definitely brings that kind of bizarre, light-hearted sadism to his part.”

Pine says he did his best to keep up with Sudeikis, Day and Bateman in terms of displaying comedy chops. He refers to the trio as the meeting point of “the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges.”

The heavily improvised scenes were particularly challenging as Pine tried to keep the dialogue coming while not laughing out of character.

“In one scene, Charlie and Jason (Sudeikis were being brutally funny. And I couldn’t keep it together,” says Pine. “And there’s Bateman off camera not cracking a smile at all. He’s the ninja of improv comedy, where I am just the baby in it.”

**Click the photos to view full resolution.

Cosmopolitan.com — On the 2005 set of Just My Luck, two careers collided spectacularly. There was the 18-year-old star, considered the most promising actress of her generation, commanding a $7 million-plus paycheck. And there was the 24-year-old no-name leading man, just happy to be there. Perhaps the romantic comedy’s hackneyed plotline about the world’s luckiest ingenue (Lindsay Lohan) swapping fortunes with a random hot guy (Chris Pine) came true. While Lohan never again reached such heights and today is trawling for paid club appearances, Pine is one of Hollywood’s most in-demand leading men.

Lohan’s tabloid-fodder antics on the New Orleans set of Just My Luck — which led to at least one shutdown — offer a stark juxtaposition of professionalism and the right way to build a career. “It was a real cyclone of insanity, like being around The Beatles,” recalls Pine. “It was fascinating to watch, and in hindsight it’s really a distinct moment in someone’s life when you see what’s really wonderful about what we get to do and what’s really dangerous about it.”

Pine put his head down and worked. But he took away a valuable lesson from the experience: Never believe your own hype.

“Hollywood is like living in a weird bubble,” he says. “A bunch of people take care of you and get you stuff, and you’re the center of that little microcosmic world. You start believing that it is real and … you deserve it.”

Now 33, the actor captains one mega-franchise with Star Trek (at Paramount) as he launches a second (also at Paramount) with Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, which opens Jan. 17 after being pushed back from Christmas Day. Based on the popular spy character created by the late Tom Clancy(though it is the first film not based on a Clancy novel), Jack Ryan will fully test Pine’s leading-man status and his value (Pine was paid $4 million for the film with backend compensation and will be paid $8 million and $12 million for each sequel). Although 2009’s Star Trek and the 2013 sequel,Star Trek Into Darkness, successfully reinvigorated a moribund brand, conventional wisdom holds that the franchise rested on director J.J. Abrams’ shoulders and coasted on Star Trek’s built-in audience. With Jack Ryan, Paramount and co-financier Skydance Productions are taking a $60 million gamble that Pine is a star outside of Trek.

Abrams is certain of it. “He’s got an amazing, compelling watchability — you can’t take your eyes off of him,” says the director. “His good looks are palatable to men and enticing to women.”

But is Pine a movie star? The answer, tentatively, in the age of Hollywood’s A-list deficit, would be yes. The two Star Trek films brought in a combined $853 million worldwide box-office haul, while Fox’s Unstoppable took in $167.8 million worldwide — but that 2010 film largely was viewed as aDenzel Washington vehicle. Fox’s This Means War, which found him opposite Tom Hardy and Reese Witherspoon, earned $156.5 million (despite a critical beating). Meanwhile, other Pine projects barely registered, including 2012’s People Like Us and 2009’s Carriers (the two films combined for a dismal $18 million).

But in an industry now more likely to give top billing to a brand like Marvel or a toy like Transformers, the notion of actor hierarchy might be antiquated. Case in point is the teaser poster for Jack Ryan. Pine’s face is obscured in shadow and unrecognizable. His name appears nowhere on the poster, while Clancy, writers Adam Cozad and David Koepp, director Kenneth Branaghand, of course, the name “Jack Ryan” — the everyman spy previously played by Alec Baldwin,Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck — are proudly displayed. (Jack Ryan producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura says that the teaser poster was meant to create an air of mystery. Subsequent trailers and art featured Pine front and center.)

Paramount president of production Marc Evans is emphatic: “I think he’s a quintessential movie star. There is now a phenomenal group of actors who have the chance to be big movie stars if we continue to make movie-star movies.”

If Pine feels any pressure, he shows no signs of it over lunch at The Smile, a hipster restaurant in Manhattan’s NoHo neighborhood. Whenever Pine finds the time, he heads to New York from his hometown of Los Angeles. On this day, he is making a pit stop on his way back from London, where he just wrapped Rob Marshall’s musical Into the Woods. [Continue Reading..]

I highly recommend reading the entirety of Chris’s feature and interview (it’s 3 pages but worth the read!) with Men’s Journal over at their website.

MensJournal.com — There he is, a 33-year-old movie star, improbably handsome, out drinking with friends on a drizzly autumn Saturday in London, chatting up girls, getting a little buzzed, letting loose – an indulgence he’s just recently begun to allow himself. Chris Pine has a week’s worth of stubble going and a gray knit cap pulled low over his dirty-blond hair, but inevitably, he keeps getting recognized.

Well, sort of.

One of Pine’s pals is wearing sneakers, so they’re having trouble getting into a club. They’re stuck waiting in the rain when the hostess spots Pine and waves them through. He thanks her, and she offers a fame-besotted smile. “Don’t worry,” she says, gazing into familiar pale-blue eyes. “I loved you in The Hangover.” Bradley Cooper – in her club!

Then there’s the guy who tells Pine how totally psyched he is to be at the same bar as Chris Hemsworth – Thor himself. And yet another dude, who asks Pine what movies he’s been in – Pine lies, tells him, “Captain America.” “Oh, my God, yes!” the dude says, thrilled to be meeting Chris Evans.

Worst of all, there’s the pretty young British woman. “I’m going to guess you’re an actor,” she says. “You’re American, you’re here on business .?.?.”

“That’s an incredibly on-the-nose guess,” Pine replies.

They chat, and it seems to be going OK, until she starts apologizing: “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I don’t know who you are.”

“Sweetheart, it is totally cool,” he says, thinking, “and I have no idea who the fuck you are.” But she keeps doing it, until he loses patience: “If you apologize one more time, I’m going to have to leave this conversation.”

“I’m sorry,” she blurts, for the fifth time. Pine walks away.

“I clearly haven’t made a good enough impression on people,” Pine says the next day, laughing. “My go-to line when it’s the résumé game is that I’m either Chris Evans or Ryan Reynolds.”

To clear up any confusion: Pine is the guy who plays a young Captain James T. Kirk in the new Star Trek movies, the one who’s about to take on the late Tom Clancy’s CIA-analyst hero in January’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. He held his own against Denzel Washington in the runaway-train flick Unstoppable, started his movie career as a tween-eye-candy prince opposite Anne Hathaway in The Princess Diaries 2. He’s been in London since August shooting Into the Woods, a film version of the Stephen Sondheim musical fairy tale, in which he plays another prince, this time the one who gets with Cinderella.

There are so many of them now, these blue-eyed, blond-haired, movie-star Chrisses and Ryans, each more jacked and CGI-perfect than the next, and Pine is uncomfortable with what he sees as an unhealthy homogeneity. “The mass audience doesn’t want to see you if you aren’t perfect,” he says, leaning against a brick wall in Tinello, a posh Italian restaurant dark enough to cast unnecessarily flattering shadows on his cheekbones. “If you don’t look a certain way, if you don’t have big pecs and great skin and the perfect eyes. And it’s unfortunate, because kids are growing up with body image dysmorphia because not everyone is represented on the screen.

“I get it,” he adds, sitting there in a gray T-shirt, loose at the neck, with his own big pecs and great skin and perfect eyes. “For me to talk shit on it? I’m one of the guys!”

He’s too smart, too polite to actually say it, but it’s pretty clear that Pine wants to be the best, the deepest, the most lasting of the Chrisses, if not of his whole generation of leading men. “There’s certainly the ego-based me that is very competitive,” he says. Pine is playing a long game, honing his craft and his deltoids, doing theater in his spare time, making savvy, diverse film choices – the Sondheim musical, playing an obnoxious boss’s son in Horrible Bosses 2, a character part as a ZZ Top–bearded billionaire in the comedy Stretch. [Continue Reading …]

HollywoodReporter.com — Imax is set to release Paramount Pictures’ and Skydance Productions’ Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit worldwide starting Jan. 17.

The giant-screen exhibitor will digitally remaster the Kenneth Branagh-helmed thriller that stars Chris Pine and Keira Knightley.

The story centers on ex-Marine and Moscow-based financial analyst Jack Ryan (Pine), who uncovers a plot by his employer to finance a terrorist attack designed to collapse the U.S. economy. Ryan must race against time to save America and his wife (Knightley).

“Tom Clancy was one of the most gifted tellers of thrilling espionage-themed stories we have ever known,” said Greg Foster, CEO of Imax Entertainment and senior executive vp of Imax, in a statement Tuesday. “We believe that the combination of his truly iconic Jack Ryan character with this stellar cast and the immersive Imax format will provide moviegoers with a can’t-miss joyride.”

Produced by Mace Neufeld, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, David Barron and Mark Vahradian, Jack Ryan is based on characters created by Clancy.

The pic was written by Adam Cozad and David Koepp.