
Papermag Beautiful People 2007
Actor Chris Pine is well aware his profession is not all red carpets and tables at L.A.'s Hyde. His grandmother was B-movie screamstress Anne Gwynne, and his father was an actor with a contract at Universal. "I lived in Hollywood. My friends' parents were actors, and my dad was an actor, so it was more just a business," he says. "There certainly were lean times when my folks didn't work and we didn't have much money, so I knew it wasn't all roses."
Now 26, the cute, quirky and very funny Pine, who graduated from Berkeley in 2002, has gone from repossessing fitness equipment ("I didn't know what I was doing. I mean, a wrench, a hammer and a nail, they could all do the same thing, for all I know") to contracting work ("[My boss] had me crawl underneath this house, and I'm an arachnophobic so that lasted all of maybe fifteen seconds") to starring opposite Lindsay Lohan in last year's
Just My Luck and charming Anne Hathaway in
The Princess Diaries 2. "I look at it like this," he says. "I'm very fortunate that I've gotten the breaks that I've had. The breaks that I've gotten have been in movies that aren't exactly for me, but they've given me the opportunity to learn and to work with great people." This month he'll star in
Blind Dating, a "romantic dramedy," as he puts it, produced and directed by James Keach, about a blind boy (Pine) who falls for his eye doctor's East Indian receptionist. Having recently wrapped
Carriers, a psycho-thriller in which he plays one of four college-age cuties who survive a bird-flu epidemic, he says his goal is simply to keep working: "I'm open to doing anything, whether it's a play or a musical, as long as it's interesting and challenging." And, we're betting, far away from spiders and tools.
Whitney Spaner
Chris wears jeans by Diesel, shirt by Guess, sneakers by Converse. Fragrance: Kenneth Cole.
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