Chris Pine: Harry Styles ‘didn’t spit on me’ at the Venice Film Festival last year

Chris Pine covers the new issue of Esquire and holy crap, the editorial is great and so is the interview. It’s been a while since Pine – the best Chris – has done a big magazine profile and he comes across as very thoughtful, very zen, very eccentric. Like, I get the feeling he’s deeply eccentric and has been for years, but people don’t realize it because he’s simply too handsome. Pine is currently promoting Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, which I do not care about at all (sorry). I do care about Pine though, so here are some highlights:

He loves his sauna technique: “I love any sort of ritual. 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.” 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.”

On ‘Don’t Worry Darling’: “If there was drama, there was dram. 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.”

On Harry Styles & whether Harry spit on him in Venice: Pine confirms that Harry did not, in any way, spit on him as he passed. He continues, adding, “Harry’s a very very kind guy.” But Pine does admit, he sees how the fire spread. “I was on the plane with my publicist, who says I look like Rachel from Friends [with my current hairstyle], we’re flying back from Venice. And I’m sleeping, having a great time on the plane. I love planes. And she wakes me up, in a, you know, in a state. She says, ‘We have to craft a message about what happened in Venice.’ And I’m like ‘About what?’ ‘About Harry spitting on you.’ Which I have no idea what happened. She showed me the thing. It does look, indeed, like Harry spitting on me. He didn’t spit on me.”

What really happened: “I think what he said, is he leaned down, and I think he said, ‘It’s just words, isn’t it?’ Because we had this little joke, because we’re all jetlagged, we’re all trying to answer these questions, and sometimes when you’re doing these press things, your brain goes all befuddled, you know, you start speaking gibberish, and we had a joke like, ‘It’s just words, man.’”

He loved all of the Venice memes though: “All the memes I saw about my face in Venice made me f–king laugh,” he says, especially the one captioned “me on an important zoom call watching my cat throw up on the sofa.” But he swears all he was doing was admiring the ceiling of the Palazzo del Casinò, jet-laggedly. “Sometimes the question’s not that interesting and you just f–king zone out, and you’re looking at a ceiling because it’s really pretty.”

He makes his own wine: Somewhere on Pine’s acres, he’s got four rows of wine grapes growing, and he makes sure I go home with a bottle of Fine Pine Wine “Ms. Sauvy B” 2021.

He loves being goofy on screen: “I’m willfully emasculating myself, because I just don’t give a sh-t. If it makes me laugh, it makes me laugh. I love looking like a fool. Kirk’s like that, too. 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 f–king idiot.”

He always viewed acting as just a job: “I didn’t give a f–k what my father was doing. All I knew is that sometimes there was work, sometimes there wasn’t, and sometimes money was tight.”

Everything changed when he turned 30: “I would call most of my twenties the blind pursuit of success, doing as much as I could as fast as I could. And I burned out. I woke up at thirty, like, What the f–k 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? From about thirty onward, I made this conscious choice to seek joy. Not invest in this ephemeral, intangible perfect. And the less I do, the kinder I am, the better and deeper the results.”

[From Esquire]

There’s a lot more about his parents being regular working folks with steady income, and how he still can’t believe he’s rich enough to take a vacation whenever he wants. I don’t think he comes across badly there, but I can see how some of those quotes could easily be taken out of context. As for the Harry Styles stuff… lol. It was a crazy moment in gossip history, and I still believe Styles spit on him, honestly, but Pine is eager to tamp down the story, so here we are. He goes out of his way to say that Styles is a sweet guy and that he adores Florence Pugh, but yeah… I get the feeling he won’t be signing up to work with Olivia Wilde again anytime soon.

THIS SEXY GREY WOLF.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CpQQME4pYKM/

Photos courtesy of Esquire.

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