Thanks to Leeanne for bringing this to my attention!
Star Trek’s” Chris Pine may have recently scorched the top of People’s new Hottest Bachelors list, along with fellow hunks Chase Crawford and Shia LaBeouf, but beauty pageants aren’t particularly high on his personal to-do list.

“I’m going to struggle and try my best to search out the roles that are a little more interesting and not based on how good your tan looks and how coiffed your hair is,” Pine said on the eve of the Geffen Playhouse’s production of “Farragut North,” a tense political drama costarring Pine and “Sex and the City’s” Chris Noth, opening Wednesday.

“There’s a battle between commerce and art that I’m learning that doesn’t necessarily have to prevent you from pursuing more artistic ventures, as long as you utilize your commerce, knowing you’re using it to get more opportunities to do the smaller pet projects,” he said. “I’m so new at it, I’m just learning to navigate the waters.”

So Pine, 28, has been studying the log of such other captains of his industry as Paul Newman. He says the late actor is his role model “in terms of longevity and the good he was able to do in the world.”

Pine’s other American idols?

“George Clooney, for the conversation about commerce and art. Daniel Day-Lewis for his almost monkish pursuit of protecting artistic integrity, which I’m in sheer awe of. I would certainly love to be held in the kind of esteem he is. Sean Penn and Gary Oldman, I’ve had an acting crush on for years. I’m all over the spectrum.”

Not really, if you consider the fact that all those performers are acclaimed for their acting chops. That’s clearly a goal of Pine’s and one he thinks he can balance with blockbuster films like “Trek.” That’s why his first role after the mega popcorn movie is the dark and complicated spinmeister Stephen of Beau Willimon’s “Farragut North,” named for the Washington, D.C., subway stop near the vortex of lobbyists’ offices.

source: latimes.com

Chris Pine is splayed across a red restaurant banquette as if it were the throne Hollywood is offering him as one of its newly anointed male hotties. To say Pine’s actual seating is not a throne would be an understatement. The star of Paramount Pictures’ summer hit film “Star Trek” is perched on tattered old furnishings that would look at home in an Edward Hopper painting. The ratty red banquette will be a focal point of action in the political drama “Farragut North,” when it opens at the Geffen Playhouse on Wednesday.

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.

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Chris Pine steps back onto terra firma with the Geffen Playhouse production of ‘Farragut North.’
In 2007, Chris Pine was appearing in a Los Angeles production of Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig. He played the bad-boy pal, that cocky kid in the office who bends the rules for the sport of it. It was a secondary role, but Pine absolutely nailed it—a young actor to watch.

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.

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“Star Trek” leading actor Chris Pine says he is single and looking for a date, an intelligent woman. “I haven’t set my phasers on anyone. I’m a single man. I’m a dating man,” he says in an interview on “The Billy Bush Show”. “I always love the company of a fine intelligent woman, so we’ll see what happens.”

Still in the same interview, Chris also mentions one minor personal secret of his, which is about what he wears under his pants. “Briefs!” answers the actor when he is asked of what he wears underneath his big screen costumes. “I’m a briefs man!”

Professionally, Chris Pine is famous for his role as Nicholas Devereaux in 2004 comedy-romance film “Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement”. In “Star Trek”, which was released in U.S. theaters on Thursday, May 7, he stars as James Tiberius Kirk.

In the meantime, Chris is on board to star in upcoming action-drama movie “Killing Pablo”, which will team him up with Christian Bale. Besides, he will also lend his voice for animation flick “Quantum Quest.”

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This Is Your Captain Speaking
To the outrage of William Shatner devotees everywhere, the role of Captain Kirk in the new
Star Trek went to Chris Pine—an unproven 28-year-old from L.A.—who didn’t know a Vulcan from a Venezuelan. When it comes to his breakthrough role, we don’t know whether to congratulate him or send our sympathies

You play Captain James T. Kirk. Any razzing from old friends of late?
It’s pretty fucking inescapable. I play basketball with a bunch of guys at 9:30 a.m. and
it’s like, “Yo, wussup,
Captain Kirk!” I don’t have a smart comeback yet.

You weren’t much of a Trekkie, we hear.

I was a Star Wars kid. The kitsch factor in the original Star Trek series is high, but the show manages to take on these huge questions about race, sex, and war. I have a great appreciation for what Mr. Shatner did with the part. There’s a gravity
to it, but he’s having fun.

Surely tiptoeing around the rabid fan base—calling him “Mr. Shatner” and all that—must get old?
The amount of dissection of the minutiae of this movie…I was blown away by the protectiveness. I’m definitely guilty of looking at the blogs, and I’m not a fan of the anonymity [of the Internet], how it allows people to just spew poisonous vitriol like vomit.

You seem interested in playing a diverse range of roles. Are you worried you’ll forever be typecast because of your looks?
I did a movie called Smokin’ Aces, and the casting director didn’t want to
see me for the role of a neo-Nazi hit man. But it didn’t bum me out. I had to prove I could do it.

What was the state of the Lindsay Lohan circus when you starred opposite her in Just My Luck [in 2006]?
She was making a lot of money and attracting
a lot of attention from the paparazzi. It put in stark relief that I don’t want that kind of life.

Isn’t Star Trek bringing it anyway?
Maybe. But I’m not gonna hunt it out. I won’t tell my publicist I’m going to Starbucks in twenty minutes and to call the photographers.

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