Chris Pine Should Retire From Being a Chris

Being a Chris has served Chris Pine well. Absent a single star-making performance that comes along once in a blue moon — Timothée Chalamet in Call Me By Your Name is a recent example that comes to mind — it’s tough for an actor to rise above the level of their contemporaries. Whether it was an inevitable conflation within the entertainment press or a more savvy strategy by some genius publicist out there, the concept of the Chrisses turned a possible negative (buncha unestablished and seemingly interchangeable white guys named Chris keep nabbing these peachy roles in superhero movies) into a marketing hook. And every time we ranked the Chrisses based on various criteria or declared a favorite for whatever very studious reason, all four Chrisses got more powerful. It’s been a lowkey genius move, and it continues to work wonders for the Marvel trio of Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, and Chris Pratt.

That said, Chris Pine should retire from being a Chris for the good of his career. He doesn’t have to change his name, though that honestly might help. He could hold it down as an Oliver, a Thomas, or an Alexander. Even just extending his name to Christopher might be enough to break him away from the group. As long as Chris Pine remains a Hollywood Chris, he’s going to be tied to Big Superhero Filmmaking. Only Chris Pine has never been a Big Superhero. Hemsworth will always be Thor, just as Evans will always be Captain America. Pratt is as much tied to Andy Dwyer on Parks and Recreation as he is to Peter Quill, but he’s certainly made his stamp on the MCU after essentially dooming half the universe to snappy annihilation.

Pine, on the other hand, has played the love interest in Wonder Woman, a movie that ends with his character sacrificing himself for the greater good. And yes, Pine is supposed to be in Wonder Woman 2, but we don’t know what form his role will take. And besides, Natalie Portman played the love interest in two Thor movies but was still able to extricate herself and do her intense art movies like Jackie and Vox Lux. And as strange as it may seem for an actor who’s played Captain Kirk in three Star Trek movies, Natalie Portman is a great career role model for Chris Pine, an actor whose instincts appear to be far more eclectic than his Chris brethren.

Pine’s two collaborations with director David Mackenzie — the current Outlaw King, streaming on Netflix, and the 2016 Best Picture nominee Hell or High Water — are deceptive in the ways in which they challenged Pine as a lead performer. That he comes across equally at ease playing a Scottish king or a beaten-down bank robber in the American west says a lot about his versatility. Add to that his recent forays into broad comedy (Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later; Angie Tribeca), post-apocalyptic thriller (Z for Zachariah), and even musicals (Into the Woods, where he was legitimately great), and you’ve got an actor who’s got so much more in the tank than playing the love object in a few more Wonder Woman sequels.

This isn’t meant to sell the other Chrisses short, of course. I’d kill actual people to get Chris Evans as a singing prince in a musical. But right now, the adventurous one is Chris Pine, and continuing to be defined as one of the four Hollywood Chrisses can only keep him boxed into the superhero blockbuster realm. Meanwhile, he’s mastering a Scottish brogue; he’s crossing dimensions with Ava DuVernay in A Wrinkle in Time. He’s the one ready to graduate from Chris status and take on Hollywood as his own man with his own name. Like Nathaniel or something.