Check out Chris’s entire interview over at IGN.com!

Chris Pine on… Reintroducing the Character
“With this film we’ve tried to give him a substantive enough background and backstory so that we understand why he moves and thinks the way that he does.

“For me it’s always more interesting to kind of start from square one, take the fundamental pillars of the character, and around that try to create something new and different. Just like with Captain Kirk, for instance, I can’t do what came before and what those other guys did as Jack Ryan – I can only do my version of it.

“But there are certain things that I think are fundamental to Jack. Like I remember in Clear and Present Danger, I always loved the fact that it was Anne Archer who’s driving the Porsche and he’s driving a VW Bug. He’s kind of frumpy and she’s kind of the wunderkind doctor. I like that about Jack – that he’s more comfortable in his study. He’s comfortable with his books. He’s more comfortable putting a puzzle together. He’d rather spend a Sunday at home than go out. He’s a homebody. There’s a comfort in isolation, but there’s really an intense confidence in his own abilities to figure stuff out and to work through things in his own mind.”

Chris Pine on… Shadow Recruit’s Story
“I think our plot is interesting and kind of apropos to what’s happening in the world, but not overly convoluted so people will spend time figuring out what’s going on.

“Jack’s experience is an experience that many people share. I don’t share it. I don’t know if anybody here has. He’s been to war. He’s seen war and it’s affected a lot of people and I don’t think we take that lightly in the film – how that traumatised him and how that kind of pushed him in a different direction in his life. And also, he shares what we all share, which is 9/11. Which is going through a major turning point. It’s Pearl Harbour for another generation.

“Even though he’s smart and he is going to save the world, he’s got a lady in his life and he’s got a lot of troubles with that relationship and he’s trying to figure that out and they’re trying to work on their communication skills. It’s a lot of very accessible, human stuff that we all deal with.

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 …]

Here are some snippets from the special event and what Chris had to say about the next installment in the Jack Ryan series along with a little tidbit about his role in Into The Woods.

You can read the entire clip recap and interview with Chris over at CinemaBlend.com

CinemaBlend.com — At a special event in New York City, Paramount Pictures invited journalists to watch 17 minutes of the finished film, which will hit theaters early next year. Pine himself had flown in from Los Angeles to emcee the screening, and was on hand to answer questions. “Jack is really an analyst,” Pine offered in his introduction. “He can get physical, but is much more comfortable behind the scenes.” He went on to point out that Jack Ryan is no James Bond, who is never anything but cool in the face of certain death. Pine stressed that instead Ryan is a pretty normal guy thrown into an extraordinary situation, and this was quite clear in the first clip.

The scene began in a bustling airport in Moscow. Jack Ryan (Pine), dressed in a sharp suit, introduces himself to Embee, a Ugandan bodyguard/”fancy driver” who has been tasked with watching out for him while he’s in Russia. Nonso Anozie plays the jovial driver, and Game of Thrones fans will know him as Xaro Xhoan Daxos, the duplicitous merchant of Qarth. A hulking man at 6’6″, Anozie towers over 6-foot-even Pine as they enter a swanky, modern hotel with garish red furniture and lit up floor panels.

In a luxurious suite, Ryan is taking in the incredible view when he spies in the window’s reflection Embee has pulled out a gun. Instinctively, Ryan ducks and flees to the bathroom as the huge would-be killer blocks the door to the hallway. A brawl ensues that seems to put Ryan at the disadvantage. After all, he is far smaller and lacks a weapon. But his training (we’re later told he’s a marine) kicks in. Ryan utilizes his surroundings to his advantage, taking Embee by surprise, knocking him off balance, and ultimately ending the giant in a desperate bid to save his own life.

Pine pulls off the physicality of the complicated fight choreography with aplomb. Afterwards he said of the stunt work, “I think any actor you talk to, it just seems like part of the component of doing an action film is that you try to do as much of it as you can. I enjoy it because, for instance, the fight scene that you saw, it’s like a dance so there’s like a Zen to it. You have to be really, really focused because you’re moving at really high speeds and there’s kind of a beauty to it because your world just kind of closes down, your vision is about that wide.” He pulled his two hands together to suggest a sort of tunnel vision. He went on to detail how some stunts he didn’t attempt not just for his own safety but for the safety of his scene partner. Best to call in a professional in situations like that. ?Whenever possible, though, he was game. “I enjoy it and I also think it’s important because it allows the camera all those little itty bitty moments of seeing your face. It just, again, kind of gives a reality to it.”

Another challenge Pine faced was having to tone down the big emotions he’d grown accustomed to playing as Captain Kirk. “Kirk’s fun because he’s such a blowhard and also tonally in that film I can be a little bit bigger and there’s comedy and you can go a little bit broader and I love, love that,” Pine explained. “And this, Ken kept on asking me to go smaller and it’s very difficult for me because I’m very used to kind of being, you know, the brash thing, whatever. It was hard. It was difficult to kind of cut as much as I could out of everything and Ken kept on saying we just wanted to rest the camera on your face and see a man thinking and processing what’s happening. I’m not very comfortable with that. I kind of want to do something and he kept on telling me to stop it.”

Asked if part of the appeal of his current project, the musical Into the Woods, was the return to big emotions, Pine responded, “Yeah. That was really more because it was such an incredible cast and I don’t have a very big part, but I just wanted to be a part of that group. And I never sung before – I mean, on camera. I sing in the shower… But yeah, it’s fun. The Prince Charming is very kind of fairy tale-ish and two-dimensional and big hair. I mean, it was a blast. I love that stuff. “

Apparently Chris now knows to treat every woman like a queen. Find out more below!

Cosmopolitan.com — You’ve become the go-to guy for big action—Star Trek, This Means War, Jack Ryan. Are you an adrenaline junkie? I get a lot of my kicks doing these films. I do stuff for my job that I did playing make-believe as a boy in my backyard. But I’m not a dummy—if I sense something could permanently injure me, I step away and let the professionals do it.

What’s the best advice you’ve been given about dating? My mom always told me to take my elbows off the table, so that if I ever had dinner with a queen, I would know how to eat properly. But she also taught me basic things about being a gentleman, like opening car doors. Especially in Los Angeles, I think people lose those small gestures that harken back to a different time but are still mutually appreciated by men and women. Those little things are just nice.

Do you think online dating has ruined chivalry? No, I have a couple of buddies who use Tinder. Whatever eases the process is great, since it can be awkward and uncomfortable meeting someone. It’s the same jumping-off point—”Oh, she’s cute” or “He’s cute”—and then you start talking. Ultimately, it comes down to the connection you have with that person once she’s in the room.

Best date ever? I saw the Rolling Stones seven or eight years ago. I was with my girlfriend, and we were five rows from the front. I remember Ronnie Wood was walking back to the stage, and he looked at me and my girlfriend and then he flipped us his guitar pick! We never found it because it was intercepted by about 50 hands, but it was still a pretty awesome moment.

You worked with Lindsay Lohan on Just My Luck. Any words of advice? She’s had a rough go of it. I’m sure the trials and tribulations that she’s been through have taught her plenty. Our business loves comeback stories. From Drew Barrymore to Robert Downey Jr., there’s a long list of people who have faced their troubles, wildly overcome them, and succeeded. If anyone can do that, it’s Lindsay.