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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Over Lifes Thorny Path Youll Stumble_\n\n So says Grandma, a wizened biddy with a wan complexion, frozen inside a glass console nearby the Wonder Wheel on Brooklyns Coney Island. On a raw autumn morning, Chris Pine stands there in the rotating shadow of the hulking old ride. He pulls down the brim of his tweed newsboy cap, digs in his jeans pocket, and deposits fifty cents. Grandma creaks to life and runs a finger across the fan of tarot cards on the table before her. Her prophecies are delivered on two-by-four-inch yellow cards, printed sometime in the past century by the mystics at the Mike Munves Corp., New York, then stacked, loaded, and left here to slumber, waiting for the day when a budding movie star would come along with two quarters and a desire to learn his fate. \n\n\n\n _Then Youll Awake One Fine Day and\n\n Your Troubles Will Have Vanished Away_\n\n It has been a pretty good year. Pines sly reinvention of Captain James T. Kirk helped propel Star Trek to the rare trifecta of success among audiences, critics, and geeks. And though sudden fame isnt without its own Thorny Path, today feels indeed like a Fine Day. Its Pines first visit to Coney Island, and hes smitten: Nathans, the Cyclone, the Parachute Jump\u2014each has been duly assessed and proclaimed fucking awesome as we rush back and forth on the Boardwalk.\n\n God, I wish Id brought my camera, he says, standing on tiptoe to peer over a chain-link fence at a beat-up trailer where some unfortunate carny spends his nights. \n\n We head to an arcade near the Wonder Wheel where Pine demonstrates admirable taste in amusements\u2014eschewing ashier video oerings for the analog pleasures of Skee-Ball. Next door, he pumps quarters into a shooting range. (Set phasers to pffft.) And if New Yorks onetime Playground by the Sea has seen better days, if its romance is of the seedier variety, well, thats okay, too. Pine has already proven himself adept at animating some of the mustier, faded corners of American pop culture.\n\n\n\n _You Were Natures Stepchild.\n\n Always Managing to Get in Trouble_\n\n Well\u2026that might be a stretch. For all his midwestern good looks\u2014the fair hair, the sharp chin, the blue eyes\u2014Chris Pine came to Hollywood not as some wide-eyed bus-station ingenue but as a child of the film businesss working class. His grandmother, Anne Gwynne, was a star of 1940s B features like Weird Woman and Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome and appeared as a pinup girl in the unfortunately named Yank magazine, which was distributed to soldiers during World War II. His father, Robert Pine, is a charter member of the That Guy Society\u2014an actor with a several-decades-long list of credits, whose face you know but name youve never heard. Most famously, he played Ponch and Jons sergeant on CHiPs; more recently, he popped up as Jim Halperts father on The Office.\n\n Pine, then, grew up in the culs-de-sac of Studio City and Valley Village knowing both the glamorous and the industrial sides of the Glamour Industry. I was privileged, for sure, he says. Definitely sheltered. But Id also seen the ups and downs of a career where, if theres no work, theres no work.\n\n\n\n Fortunately, you had an understanding mother who helped you smooth away your difficulties\n\n Now, thats a little warmer: Pines mom had enjoyed a brief acting career herself but then became a family therapist. It certainly made puberty interesting, Pine says of having a mom tuned in to the particulars of adolescent awkwardness and rage. One thing Pines mother wasnt going to have was a child actor in the family. Luckily, preteen Pine was obsessed by Top Gun. But he wanted to be a fighter pilot, not Tom Cruise.\n\n And Pine developed the sort of wide-ranging curiosity not found in kids who crave the spotlight from birth. On the Boardwalk, he questions a couple of tourists about their Holga cameras. He wants to know how Robert Mosess public-works projects aected the economic development of Coney Island. He engages our cabdriver, an Albanian Kosovar, in a discussion of how things stand in the Herzegovinian city of Mostar, which Pine and a friend recently visited on a trip that also included a stop at Auschwitz\u2014just your average run-of-the-mill movie-star romp.\n\n As for the family business, it wasnt until his years at Berkeley that Pine came to acting. Basically, I was always looking to find a group of friends, and theater provided that, he says. He reveled in odd roles, like the multiple characters he played in a production of the Irish play Talbots Box in Berkeley.\n\n All of which\u2014if you can tuck away your cynicism for a moment\u2014makes believable his contention that taking on the role of Kirk was one of the tougher decisions of his career. By then he had achieved some film success, notably as a bad prince in Princess Diaries 2 and as a speed-addled neo-Nazi in Joe Carnahans Smokin Aces. But he felt hed hit a wall, that he no longer knew what he was doing in the business. I told my agents that as a bachelor with a cheap apartment, I had enough money to take a couple of years o if thats what it was going to take.\n\n The agents nodded politely. Then they came back with Star Trek.\n\n I said, Are you kidding? Thats the last thing I want to do, Pine says.\n\n I totally understood that feeling, says director J. J. Abrams. For a young actor, a part like Kirk has got lots of advantages but also plenty of disadvantages. When I called to oer him the part, he said, Youre not going to make me wear spandex, are you? \n\n Its a truism that youre rarely more charming than while interviewing for a job you dont want. So Pines initial reluctance to become Americas next action hero may explain why he made such a thoroughly likable captain of the Enterprise\u2014never devolving into a William Shatner impression, while still possessed of some essential Kirkitude. When I watched the scene in which Kirk and Bones meet for the first time, I let out an actual sob in the theater, testies no lesser an authority than Leonard Nimoy.\n\n Pine appreciates the quality of pued-up self-parody that Shatner brought to the role. You inflate Kirk and then you pop Kirk, he says. And Pines version radiated a confidence\u2014to look foolish, to get his ass kicked, to share the screen with other actors\u2014reminiscent of early Harrison Ford or late George Clooney. The Ford connection was made all the stronger by reports that Pine might take over Fords role as Jack Ryan in the Patriot Games franchise.\n\n\n\n You have a sensitive disposition and are easily hurt. Try to develop a tough skin\n\n Ah, see, now Grannys getting cooking.\n\n Even the most blessed acting career is lled with dozens of cruel, casual blows and rejections. Pine has a knack for remembering each one. That includes rude patrons at his one restaurant job, just before landing Princess Diaries 2. The customer is not always right, he says with the smile of a man who will never be forced to work the hosting station again. Sometimes the customer is a fucking asshole. And the prospective agent who told him his audition was the worst thing she had ever seen? Hes considering sending her a Limited Edition Star Trek Eggo Waffle, emblazoned with Kirks and Spocks faces, along with a note: Eat me.\n\n But no one gets the brunt of Pines anger more than the paparazzi that began camping outside his Silver Lake apartment soon after Star Trek was released\u2014in part, it has to be said, because he was reportedly dating The Hills star Audrina Patridge.\n\n I have never seen anybody react to that stuff so poorly, says his co-star John Cho, who remembers a lunch he had with Pine and Zachary Quinto, Star Treks Spock, soon after the film became a runaway hit. There was a guy with a camera, and Chris couldnt concentrate. He was up in the window giving the guy the finger, trying to mess up his shots. I believe the word maggot was tossed around. I was really taken aback.\n\n Pines intensity barely dims in the retelling: I made the mistake of talking to one of these guys outside my apartment. I said, Do you have a family? What do you tell them at the end of the day? Daddy had a good day, he got a shot of Lindsay Lohans beaver?\n\n Theres nobody trailing us as we wander past the amusements still open this late in the season. In fact, nobody seems to recognize Pine at all. And yet its impossible not to sense the charisma Cho describes as almost Bill Clinton\u2013like. It even works on the least susceptible person you can imagine\u2014a carny running a mini-basketball game. Pine misses the first two shots but sinks the next with a nifty bounce on the pavement, then a swish through the hoop. The carny looks both ways, deigns to remove the brown stub of a cigarette from his lips, and slips Pine a stued white tiger.\n\n Then we happen upon one of Coney Islands more sordid and apocalyptic diversions: Shoot the Freak. In an empty lot between two concession stands, theres a pit filled with graffiti-covered Mad Max rubble. Along the Boardwalk railing is an array of paintball rifles and below, amidst the junk, a man in a flak jacket and helmet: The Freak. Its five shots for $3, fifteen for $5. \n\n Pine is agog. This is\u2026 This is the lowest\u2026 This is the worst thing I have ever seen.\n\n The barker, a droop-lidded teenager with a mike and a decidedly local accent, keeps up his patter. Cmon. Shoot da freak. Wha? You don wanna shoot da freak? I guaran-freakin-tee you will have a good time shootin the freak in the freakin head.\n\n As the spiel rolls on, Pine begins murmuring under his breath. Hes repeating each line\u2014bray for bray, honk for honk\u2014until hes got a perfect Brooklyn accent worthy of an extra in a World War II movie going.\n\n Thats the freaks college fund, the barker says, pointing to a tips bucket. Cmon. He don wanna be the freak forevah\u2026.\n\n\n\n You are a very impulsive individual. Life for you should hold no dull moments\n\n Jeez. That sounds awfully close to May you live in interesting times.\n\n Pine is keenly aware of the hazards of success and the somewhat precarious moment he finds himself in. Ive seen what can happen to an actor when hes just working for the sake of working, Pine says. All of a sudden its ten years later, your careers happened, and you havent had any control. I still assume that, any day, Im going to be exposed as a fraud. That, like I once heard Gene Hackman say, the acting police are going to burst in and take away my card.\n\n And should that day come? If the paparazzi disappear, along with the spandex and the waffles?\n\n He shrugs. Ive learned that when you make big life decisions, life says, Fuck you. This is what you actually have in store. \n\nBrett Martin is a gq correspondent."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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