Why Chris Pine, the modern-day Harrison Ford, should be a bigger star

There are many pleasures to be had from the new film of Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, which may be 2023’s most unexpectedly enjoyable and unpretentious blockbuster. Eschewing the portentous darkness and often incomprehensible world-building that has bogged down everything from Game of Thrones to the recent Lord of the Rings TV series, it’s a fleet-footed and thoroughly entertaining slice of escapism that offers as many laughs as it does thrills. But its masterstroke does not lie in its blessedly irreverent attitude towards its source material, or the presence of a scene-stealing Hugh Grant as the villain. Instead, its greatest special effect is the casting of its leading man. 

As Edgin, a principled thief who winds up on a quest to recover his daughter’s trust and affection while trying to save the world in the process, Chris Pine delivers a performance that will undoubtedly not be recognised by any awards body, because actors in big-budget special effects pictures tend to be ignored. Yet it is a masterstroke on Pine’s part, as well as that of the writer-directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley, that his protagonist is not the dashing hero that one might expect. 

Instead he's an all too human figure, always ready with a witty quip and subtly deflating one-liner, but one who leaves the vast majority of the swordplay and conventional heroism to the other members of the cast. Pine is consistently hilarious, channelling the spirit of Cary Elwes in The Princess Bride – a clear touchstone for the film – and manages to make the antics on screen seem almost relatable. If a flourish seems absurd, you can bet your bottom dollar that Edgin will point this out, sardonically, even before any other character can react. 

It is a rare and daring move to have one’s male lead in a film of this nature be as much comic relief as he is its protagonist, but it works beautifully. Just as Harrison Ford’s Han Solo managed to be by far the most likeable and enjoyable character in the original Star Wars trilogy by dint of being the most recognisably human, then Pine – an actor who has repeatedly, and rightly, been compared to Ford earlier in his career – abandons the alpha-male stylings of his peers in favour of something altogether fresher. There’s no doubt that he has the charisma and good looks of a leading man, but Pine merrily subverts this. He’s so much fun that you miss him whenever he’s offscreen. 

It remains to be seen whether Dungeons & Dragons spawns a series of sequels or if it will be a standalone picture. (Its US opening gross was $37 million: not at all bad, but not the blockbuster number that generally leads to a follow-up being greenlit overnight.) But whatever happens, it represents yet another evolution in the career of a man who’s often lazily referred to as one of the four Hollywood Chrises: the others, of course, being Hemsworth, Evans and Pratt. 

The quartet are A-list stars who have made their names in special effects-heavy blockbusters, and are likeable, sympathetic presences on screen. However, it’s Pine who has had by far the most interesting career to date; if one had to bet on one of them achieving real longevity, it would be him. 

It was, ironically, another big franchise picture that first established Pine as an actor to watch: JJ Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek reboot. Before then, he had appeared in the undemanding likes of The Princess Diaries 2 and the Lindsay Lohan romantic comedy Just My Luck: rites of passage for a young actor, perhaps, but hardly much of a stretch. 

Abrams, though, saw a quality in Pine that he wished to channel when he cast him as Captain Kirk, in a performance which simultaneously paid homage to William Shatner’s legendary interpretation of the character and established him afresh for a new generation. Pine’s Kirk was cocky, impulsive, reckless and flirted with being wholly unsympathetic at times, but then a flash of his boyish grin and innate charisma swiftly brought him back to likeability. And he was given what amounted to a papal seal of approval by Shatner himself. Pine, the older actor said, was “so good and such a leading man”; vaingloriously, he even suggested that Pine would be the ideal casting for him if ever a biopic was to be made of his life. 

Yet Pine’s carefully constructed career has suggested he is keen to approach greater challenges than simply to spend his life either imitating or playing William Shatner. As Dungeons & Dragons shows so entertainingly, he is a peerlessly talented comic actor, whose appearances in everything from the adaptation of Sondheim and Lapine’s musical Into The Woods – in which he plays Cinderella’s Prince and duets on the film’s funniest song, Tragedy – to the otherwise negligible Horrible Bosses 2 show that he’s possessed of whip-smart timing and a willingness to make fun of himself, and his screen persona, that remarkably few of his peers will.

It's telling that when he is cast in more boilerplate heroic roles, he’s a less interesting presence; he appeared as Jack Ryan in the Kenneth Branagh-directed attempted reboot of the series in 2014, but was unable to bring his usual eccentricity to the part. His appearance in the Disney adventure epic The Finest Hours, meanwhile, was perfectly acceptable, but it was a performance that any other actor – especially another Chris – could have delivered with their eyes closed. 

Instead, Pine excels in more nuanced, difficult parts. He was unorthodox but effective casting as Robert the Bruce in the historical epic Outlaw King – and a brief flash of full-frontal nudity pleased his fans of both sexes – and gave probably his best performance to date in the modern-day western Hell or High Water, written by the newly ubiquitous Taylor Sheridan and revolving around two brothers whose bank robberies are motivated by a strange sense of altruism. Pine was able to go toe-to-toe with a typically magisterial Jeff Bridges, playing the veteran lawman hunting the pair down, and came out at least equal, if not triumphant. 

The suspicion remains that Pine, like Jude Law before him, is a character actor who is often miscast in leading man roles, and resents it. He was an enjoyably low-key presence in the Wonder Woman pictures, but neither of them really stretched him as an actor. In a recent interview with Esquire, he all but confirmed the frustrations that he has felt in his career: “The material that interests me is not always the kind of material that’s offered to me,” he said. “And I can only do so much in terms of reaching out to writers and directors I like, or telling my representatives what I want to do.” 

Little wonder that he has made his directorial debut with the black comedy Poolman: in addition to co-writing the script, he also stars in it, suggesting that taking a more hands-on approach is what truly drives him in his career. 

He was also the sole redeeming feature of the disastrous Don’t Worry Darling, a film now vastly more interesting for the behind-the-scenes shenanigans involving the relationship between its director Olivia Wilde and its leading man Harry Styles than anything that appeared on screen. As the charismatic but sinister cult leader Frank, Pine showed a talent for nefarious villainy, but his work in the picture was overshadowed by a bizarre premiere at the Venice Film Festival where, amongst other things, Styles was accused of spitting on Pine (he did not) and where Pine was observed looking weary and zoned-out during the press conference. 

When asked about this, he replied: “Sometimes the question’s not that interesting, and you just f___ing zone out, and you’re looking at a ceiling because it’s really pretty.” He dealt with the off-set shenanigans with appealing briskness (“If there was drama, there was drama. 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”) but should have been grateful that he was able to walk away from a wholly unsuccessful film with his head held high. 

It is Chris Pine’s fate – whether he cares or not – that he is unable to open a film based purely on his name. He may be an established leading man but he is not a movie star of the Tom Cruise or even the Chris Pratt variety. Instead, he may look at the pre-Mission: Impossible Cruise – an actor who once alternated between blockbusters and working with the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Oliver Stone and Paul Thomas Anderson – and take that as a template for his career. 

Still relatively young at 42, he is nonetheless embracing roles that allow him to have grey in his hair and beard and lines on his forehead, and to play against his existing persona. Just as Harrison Ford became the biggest movie star on the planet thanks to Han Solo and Indiana Jones before subverting his image, so Pine has long since moved away from the clean-cut, fresh-faced look that once built his career. Agents and talent managers around him might bemoan his decision to play against type. But for admirers of iconoclastic, old-fashioned actors who actually care about the roles they take on, Chris Pine will remain the most interesting – and certainly the most unorthodox – star of his generation.