How Chris Pine's Dungeons & Dragons Role Aligns Perfectly With The Rest Of His Career
As an actor, Chris Pine has a particular talent. When it comes to playing dazzling, cocksure characters, Pine is a natural. He's played his share of cads and scoundrels, but he never comes across as unlikeable or villainous. It certainly helps that Pine is possessed of movie matinee idol good looks, allowing his charming smiles to inform the characters he plays.
In Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley's new film "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves," Pine plays Edgin Darvis, a former bard in a fantasy kingdom who turns to thievery to survive. He is raising a teenage daughter named Kira (Chloe Coleman) and, following the death of his wife, forms a coalition of thieves to steal from the rich.
At the beginning of the film, Edgin is in prison with his best friend Holga Kilgore (Michelle Rodriguez) after a heist of theirs went awry. The two have an elaborate ploy to escape, but it relies on the presence of a bird-human that was expected to be in the room — but who is late. To stall, Edgin dictates his sob story to the fantastical parole board, claiming he is trying to elicit sympathy from them. Eventually, Edgin's bird friend does arrive and he flees out the window with Holga.
The joke of the scene is that Edgin's B.S.ing, while completely improvised, was so convincing that the parole board was going to let him go anyway.
When Den of Geek asked Pine about his trademark on-screen dazzle in a recent interview, Pine confessed that his characters tend to stand as a contrast to his real life, and all typically fall into a broad type that he likes playing: ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. It's notable that Pine has never played a character with superpowers.
Humor is often 'the weapon of people who are insecure'
Chris Pine's on-screen persona, he said, was the opposite of how he is in real life. He is not cocksure or confident and admits to feeling like he's not achieving his personal goals at the speed he'd like. His anxieties might be relatable to many. His characters are adept, he said, at certain social defense mechanisms that, on screen, read as charm. When asked about said charm, Pine said:
"I wish I could say I'd spent more concerted time thinking about it. Why it works, I'm not sure. I think, like most things, humor oftentimes is used as a deflection or the weapon of people who are insecure. It is a good crutch. Maybe it's because it comes from my own years of insecurity and dealing with my own feelings of not being good enough."
This human and relatable trait, Pine went on to say, allows him to keep both feet on the ground, as it were. Although he's appeared in several notable sci-fi and fantasy films — films filled with outlandish technologies and magical creatures — he has never wanted to play the character with all the power. His characters, he said, all possess a degree of normalcy and struggle that appeals to him. Superheroes, he says, are out. In his words:
"[Edgin] seems to fit in nicely with the kind of characters I seem to like to play, which are normal dudes that task themselves with doing big things, even though they may not be good at it, or don't have special powers, or don't believe in themselves all that much. I haven't ever played a character with extrasensory, special powers. I seem to like playing real humans trying to do big things. So I think it's all in line."
Chris Pine's career
A look back over Chris Pine's career bears this out. Even when acting in fantasy films, Pine is never the character who fires blasts from his fists or reads minds. In "Wonder Woman 1984," he played a man who found himself resurrected from death unexpectedly, and responding to a world decades past his experience. In "Into the Woods," he played Prince Charming but portrayed him as an agonized horny dude rather than a fantasy hero. In "A Wrinkle in Time," he played a scientist that had discovered extraordinary magic, but who spent the bulk of the film being held hostage.
Pine has played only two superpowered characters in his film career. In "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse," he played an ultra-capable version of the title character but was ultimately killed off to make room for a more reluctant mentor figure to the film's protagonist, Miles Morales. Pine also played the confident Jack Frost, a minor deity in 2012's "Rise of the Guardians." In that film, his teen-idol winter god teamed up with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and the Sandman to do battle with the Boogeyman.
It's notable that Pine's only superpowered characters are animated. Since animated characters only possess impressionistic human characteristics, perhaps they fell in line with Pine's personal "grounded characters only" mandate. Pine is slated to appear in another upcoming animated film called "Wish," currently scheduled for release in November 2023. Additionally, Pine is also set to lead his directorial debut "Poolman" which he also co-wrote.