Chris Pine is really cute. You’ll have to excuse me, because I just noticed that. I’ve seen pictures of him before, but all of a sudden he looks manly and fine. His star is on the rise, too. In May, he’s stepping into William Shatner’s shoes as Captain Kirk in the new, rebooted, J.J. Abrams-helmed Star Trek. Hello, nerd eye candy! Pine is also starring, later this year, in James Cameron’s sci-fi epic Avatar, with Michelle Rodriguez. Vanity Fair always takes notice of the up-and-coming talents, and they have a little mini-interview with Pine in the May issue:

It’s been a while since Hollywood had a bona fide homegrown movie star: they tend to come from places like Missouri or Kentucky, not Studio City. But here’s Chris Pine, 28 years old, native to “the Valley” and soon to be seen on-screen as the new Captain Kirk in director J.J. Abrams’s young-guns reboot of the original Star Trek.

Pine didn’t slip effortlessly into William Shatner’s double-knits. “There have been, like, three auditions in my life where I feel like I’m in a Saturday Night Live skit. One was for Avatar” – James Cameron’s upcoming science-fiction epic – “which was probably the worst audition I ever gave. Another was for 10,000 B.C., where I was just, like, on my haunches pretending to be in a loincloth in Burbank.” Pine laughs. “Then the other one was Star Trek. It was all of this jargon talk of torpedoes and photons,” which needless to say, didn’t quite trip off the tong. Fortunately, he got a second chance seven months later and nailed it.

Pine, who graduated from U.C. Berkeley, comes from two generations of actors: his father, Robert Pine, has 200-odd television shows to his credit; his grandmother is B-movie actress Annie Gwynne, who was often seen in horror films. Chris Pine isn’t jaded, but neither is he naive. “I know where I come from and what I want and why I got into [show business]. I know the reality of it. I just hope that I have longevity in my career.”

[From Vanity Fair, May print edition, Spotlight on Chris Pine, “To Boldly Star”]

Star Trek just had its premiere in Sydney, Australia on Tuesday. Chris Pine and the other cast members talked to a lot of journalists, and the obvious questions came up. Stuff like, “Can you do an impression of Shatner?” To which I wish one person would have replied, “Yes, of course I can do Shatner. All you have to do is talk like you’re in the middle of forgetting your lines.” But here’s one thing I didn’t know about Star Trek – Eric Bana (swoon) is the villain! He’s a Romulan named Nero. Epic!

The 11th Star Trek movie in 30 years had its world premiere on Tuesday, its markedly younger cast boldly going along the red carpet to a makeshift cinema in the Sydney Opera House.

Chris Pine, 28, who plays a cadet-aged James T. Kirk, admitted he’d never met William Shatner, who starred as the original Captain Kirk in the television series dating back to 1966 as well as the first Star Trek movies.

But he said he watched the TV show “quite a bit.”

“All it was doing was making me think about what the best way I could do a William Shatner impersonation,” Pine said. “It wasn’t helping bringing this story to life.”

[Eric] Bana plays Nero, the film’s heavily-tattooed Romulan villain bent on avenging the destruction of his planet. He said all the film’s cast “did everything they could” to come up with something fresh this time around.

The plot follows the young lives of the original cast from Gene Roddenberry’s TV show as they find their places on the flight deck of the U.S.S. Enterprise as junior officers. It was directed by J.J. Abrams, director of “Mission Impossible III” and “Lost.”

“Star Trek” opens in Australian cinemas on May 7, one day before opening in the United States.

From Reuters

I’m thinking Star Trek might be cool for two reasons: the nerd eye candy (Pine and Bana) and J.J. Abrams. Abrams is so cool, he even made Xenu-plagued Tom Cruise seem cool in MI:3. Abrams is so cool, he blows my mind on a weekly basis with Lost. Even if Star Trek ends up crashing and burning at the box office (doubtful), it’s nice that Hollywood has a new Bright Young Thing in Chris Pine. He doesn’t strike me as just another tween-courting pretty boy, thank God.

Chris Pine is shown at Wondercon on 2/28/09, at the Hollywood Awards Gala on 10/27/08, credit: Fame Pictures, and at the Sydney premiere of Star Trek on 4/7/09, credit: WENN.com