Chris Pine Talks About ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ In the Latest Issue of US Esquire

42 year old is one of the stars in the action movie ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ he talks for the latest issue of US Esquire March 2023.

Pine flicks the thermometer: 120 degrees and rising. He picks up a bundle of leafy twigs—to move the air around, he explains, not the kind you whip yourself with, though he’s got one of those, too. He moves the air around. Then he climbs onto the bench next to me and folds himself into an impressively deep yoga squat, ass down by his heels.

The air in my mouth feels like cotton candy. I reach for the insulated water bottle I’ve been provided. “If you taste something in that,” Pine says, “I put a bit of barley tea in there.” He tried it at a Korean restaurant; now he’s into barley tea. It’s become part of the overall sauna process. Pine enjoys a process. Making an espresso, building a fire. “I love any sort of ritual,” he says. “I can even get into a Catholic Mass because I like the aesthetic. And a sauna is a whole ritual. It’s about gifting yourself a period where there’s nothing to do other than to purify, to release, to cleanse, to start again.”

We’ll sweat and release and cleanse here for twenty minutes, until the heat becomes intolerable, then we’ll hit the unheated outdoor pool—just in and out, a quick car-battery shock to the central nervous system—and finish strong with a dip in the cold plunge, a barrel of what feels like near-freezing water built into the ground. This is how Pine, forty-two, does it every day, except we’re doing it in the morning, and he prefers to do it in the afternoon, sweating out the day’s physical and psychic accumulations. Being out in the world makes him “kind of emotionally and physically tired, so I need some sleep and some sauna time, and reading, and just puttering about in the garden.”

When he’s alone in the sauna, Pine will stretch or listen to a podcast, but because I’m here, we talk about his last big moment out in the world: the seemingly quite nutso Don’t Worry Darling press tour, consumed soap-operatically by a diversion-craving populace when the film premiered in Venice last September. “If there was drama, there was drama,” Pine says of the shoot, but for the record, “I absolutely didn’t know about it, nor really would I have cared. If I feel badly, it’s because the vitriol that the movie got was absolutely out of proportion with what was onscreen. Venice was normal things getting swept up in a narrative that people wanted to make, compounded by the metastasizing that can happen in the Twittersphere. It was ridiculous.” He speaks well of Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles (“a sweet guy”), loves Florence Pugh—whom he first worked with in 2018’s Outlaw King—“to fucking death,” and maintains that nobody spat on anybody in Venice.

This month, Pine is in another big-budget movie (the seemingly very franchisable Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, in which he’s as charming as he’s ever been onscreen, and maybe more relaxed), but he’s also preparing to roll the dice with a personal project that could change the course of his career. Or it could not. 

“We’re in a business of perception, and I’m reminded often that the way that I know and experience myself and perceive myself is oftentimes wholly different than how the industry does, or artists and creators that I’m interested in working with,” he says. “They think my interestingness only goes so far, I guess.”

“I’m a pretty intense question asker,” he’s already warned me, and this turns out to be true. By the time I leave Pine’s place, I will have told him why I wrote my first book, why I dropped out of college, what my one tattoo means, and where I was on 9/11. Ben Foster, who’s made three films with Pine, including Hell or High Water, calls him “one of the most interestedpeople I’ve ever met.”

What Pine wants to know about me now is if I liked Dungeons & Dragons, because when we meet I’m one of the few civilians who’ve seen it. When I say I liked it, he asks, “Scale of one to ten—how much did you like it?” I tell him I’d give it an eight, which Pine seems okay with. It’s probably more of a nine—genuinely funny in ways you don’t necessarily expect from an action flick based on a role-playing game—but I don’t want Pine to think I’m kissing his ass. 

“When you’re that good-looking—I think a lot of actors have a discomfort level with letting themselves be the source of amusement for people at their expense,” Goldstein says. “But not Chris.” 

“He embraces any moment where his character is emasculated,” Daley adds. 

Daley and Goldstein have said as much to their star. “They’re like, ‘We’re just so thankful that you’re willing to emasculate yourself onscreen,’ ” Pine says, laughing. “I was like, ‘Guys, this is not the way to go about complimenting me.’ ” But he gets what they’re saying. He enjoys being the comic relief, letting other actors have the slo-mo badass moments. It’s why he loved the goofy eighties-fashion-Ken-doll makeover montage in the second Wonder Woman: “I’m willfully emasculating myself, because I just don’t give a shit. If it makes me laugh, it makes me laugh. I love looking like a fool. 

“Kirk’s like that, too,” Pine points out. “In [Star Trek], he’s James Dean, and then he walks in to meet Bones and he hits his head. I want to be able to show that you can be cool and masculine without having it be a pissing contest all the time. And if you’re pissing, sometimes you piss on your foot and you can look like a fucking idiot.”

The most modern-looking objects in the room are a couple Captain Kirk Funko Pop figures positioned discreetly on a low shelf. You get two distinct feelings when you talk to Pine about Star Trek—the sense that he still feels real affection for his Starfleet crewmates and real humble gratitude for the experience, and also the sense that, in Pine’s life, the franchise is a massive machine, like the Enterpriseitself, that came around once and beamed him up and made him part of something bigger than himself, something that felt almost impossible to live up to in the moment, and then deposited him back into his working life with different prospects and different concerns, and that in the years since he last played the part, in Star Trek Beyond, he’d maybe come to a peaceful place in terms of letting Kirk go. 

Pine’s first Star Trek came out a year after the first Iron Man; Beyond was released in 2016, after Marvel’s interlocking mega-franchises had moved the goalposts for what constitutes a hit. Beyond’s gross—nearly $344 million globally—was good money, but not Avengers good. “I’m not sure Star Trekwas ever built to do that kind of business,” Pine says. “I always thought, Why aren’t we just appealing to this really rabid fan group and making the movie for a good price and going on our merry way, instead of trying to compete with the Marvels of the world?” He’d like to span more years as Kirk but wouldn’t be surprised if Beyond was the end of it. “After the last one came out and didn’t do the $1 billion that everybody wanted it to do, and then Anton”—Yelchin, who played Chekov—“passed away, I don’t know, it just seemed . . .” He pauses, looks out the window at the view Star Trekbought.

Chris Pine was born in 1980, midway through that run. Lived in Studio City and Valley Village, went to the Oakwood School with Henry Winkler’s daughter. Actors never seemed magical to Pine; acting was a job. “I didn’t give a fuck what my father was doing,” he says. “All I knew is that sometimes there was work, sometimes there wasn’t, and sometimes money was tight.”

Pine clearly doesn’t love the part of the celebrity-profile process where he’s required to tell this portion of the Chris Pine story yet again. It sounds too easy. Shy kid who never wanted to be an actor starts doing theater in college, tries acting for real, can’t book shit for two years—“Those two years sucked; they felt interminable”—but by 2003, he’s speaking his first lines on TV. He’s a drunk frat guy on ER,and then he’s on CSI: Miami, wearing a fake lip ring as a cocky skater dude whom Horatio Caine can’t wait to put in jail. That same year, he’s cast as Anne Hathaway’s love interest in The Princess Diaries 2,because at this early stage the one big thing Pine has going for him is that he looks like a Google search result for “handsome prince.” And within five years of that he’s reading for Captain Kirk.

“I would call most of my twenties the blind pursuit of success, doing as much as I could as fast as I could,”

Pine

“And I burned out. I woke up at thirty, like, What the fuck just happened? I was rich and successful and all the things that ostensibly should be the markers. And I’m like, What is it that I’m doing? And why?

“I was pretty depressed and lonely and really not present,” he continues. On the first Trek, “I was very hard on myself, super perfectionist, this kind of Calvinistic thing: If I’m not feeling pain, I’m not producing.” It was a miserable way to work, he says, and he was “probably miserable to be around.” 

It didn’t happen all at once, but as soon as he started to see it, he began reevaluating his priorities. “From about thirty onward, I made this conscious choice to seek joy. Not invest in this ephemeral, intangible perfect,” he says. “And the less I do, the kinder I am, the better and deeper the results.”

When Pine sent Jenkins the first draft, she was a little shocked. “It was a fucking masterpiece,” she tells me. “I couldn’t fucking believe it.” She came on board as a producer. The financing started to flow once Pine signed on to star. And while he says he didn’t conceive the film in order to direct it, after he and Gotler had written it, he “couldn’t imagine it being directed by anyone else.”

Pine cast Danny DeVito as Darren’s neighbor Jack, a down-on-his-luck movie director. DeVito’s own directing career stretches back to Taxi; he says he can tell when a first-time director has the goods. “I used to call him Orson,” DeVito says—as in Welles, as in wunderkind. “Right out of the box. Details. Has his finger in every pie. A very strong vision.”

Annette Bening—who plays Diane, Jack’s wife, an actress who becomes a Jungian analyst—says Pine brought an actor’s instincts to the job. “He knows how to kind of whisper in your ear, which I think most people prefer. A quiet, intimate exchange.” A quick one, too: “Long, intellectual treatises, once you’re in front of the camera, are never happy experiences.”

“It’s been mapped onto me since I was twenty-one, twenty-two years old,” he says, regarding that earnest-hero idea. “For a long time, you just embody it, until you’ve been in the business long enough and things start to shift. For a long time, I felt like the clothes were wearing me, but I was a good enough mimic to pull it off. Then you start kind of molding these characters to you, and people start seeing what you’re doing, and maybe even shifting the archetypes to really fit who you are.”

Read full article here.

Article by Alex Pappademas
Photos: Mark Seliger
Styling: Colleen Atwood
Grooming: Natalia Bruschi using Utsumi shears and Tom Ford Beauty
Creative Direction: Nick Sullivan
Design Direction: Rockwell Harwood
Visuals Direction: Justin O’Neill
Executive Director, Entertainment: Randi Peck

Watch Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves