Pine: I Was Scared To Take Kirk Role
1 min readHad Chris Pine given in to his fear, he would not have taken on the role of Captain James T. Kirk.
Pine originally thought that he would be a Sean Penn-type actor. “At the time,” he said, “I had an idea of the kind of actor I wanted to be: I kind of envisioned myself as a young Sean Penn — interesting and brooding and fucking complicated and smoking cigarettes and cutting yourself and how deep you are — I wanted to do all that shit!”
So when offered the role of Kirk, he wasn’t all that enthused about it at first and his first audition didn’t go very well. But the wife of J.J. Abrams convinced Abrams to get Pine back for another audition. “The moment you don’t care and you throw it away, is the moment you do a good job,” he said.
He was offered the job and, after two weeks of consideration, accepted the role. “I was really scared,” he admitted. Star Trek was “the big pivot-point, obviously, in my career.”
Pine’s latest work, Hell or High Water, released last summer, is currently in the running for the best picture (drama) Golden Globe award. In Hell or High Water, Pine plays Toby, one of two brothers who decide to rob branches of the bank that is foreclosing on their family land.