To boldly go where one man has gone before

Kaleem Aftab

• Last Updated: April 22. 2009 8:00PM UAE / April 22. 2009 4:00PM GMT

Chris Pine as James T Kirk and Zachary Quinto as Spock in JJ Abraham's adaptation of the classic sci-fi saga Star Trek. Courtesy Industrial Light and Magic

How do you replace William Shatner as Captain James T Kirk? That was the problem facing the creator of Lost, producer of Cloverfield, director of Mission Impossible III, JJ Abrams, when he was asked to reboot Star Trek for the 21st century.

After years of spin-offs such as The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and 10 films, five of which featuring William Shatner growing increasingly grey, it was decided that the time had come to recast the original team of space wanderers who first appeared on American TV screens in 1966. Over three years and 80 episodes, the crew of the Starship Enterprise – Mr Spock, Dr McCoy, Uhura, Scott and, most famously, Captain James T Kirk – became the stuff of TV legend.

Abrams sagely decided that the best policy was to avoid casting household names in the roles. For the pivotal role of James Tiberius Kirk, he cast the 28-year-old Chris Pine, son of the actors Robert Pine and Gwynne Gilford. In one movie, the man who looks like he could easily have had a successful career modelling clothes will supersede the success and name recognition that his parents strived to achieve throughout their long careers.

Born in Los Angeles in 1980, Pine’s journey to success seems to have moved at warp speed. At an early age Pine decided that he wanted to follow in his parents’ footsteps. “They have always been supportive,” he says. “Nonetheless, my mother definitely gave me the talk about how it is not easy. I’d already realised this because I grew up in an acting family and I saw my dad go through the good years and the bad years. I knew that it wasn’t always going to be great. And it’s nice and helpful to have parents that understand the craft and share a common language.”

His mother need not have worried. Eschewing drama school, the actor studied English at Berkeley, where he also appeared in numerous college productions. Upon finishing Pine looked to further his vocational skills by applying to do a drama course at The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.

“It was a last minute decision to do that,” he admits. “I got accepted and then I started to worry about the financial aspect of moving to London. I didn’t have enough money and I didn’t know if I wanted to go that much. The money was going to have to come out of my pocket, so I just figured that I’d let my ego take a pat on the back from the mere fact that I got in and just try to become an actor myself.”

After winning a few cameo roles in hit shows such as ER and CSI: Miami in 2003, the actor was thrust into the limelight when he was cast to play Anne Hathaway’s love interest in Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement. The offers for romantic comedies kept coming and Pine soon found himself acting opposite Lindsay Lohan in Just My Luck. At that point he seemed destined for a career as a poster boy for teenaged girls.

Now that he has been remoulded as an action hero, Pine is not ready to dismiss the films that helped raise his profile. He says: “I feel very fortunate with the amount of opportunities that I’m now being presented with. They are more diverse than five years ago and there are more of them, but I certainly have nothing against movies like Just My Luck and Princess Diaries 2. I had a lot of fun making them but, as any actor will tell you, they just want to learn and grow and do different roles as they get older.”

The first signs that Pine could branch out as an action star came with his appearance as one of the Tremor brothers in Joe Carnahan’s hit-man extravaganza Smokin’ Aces. This was followed last year by a turn as Bill Pullman’s wayward son in the California drama Bottle Shock. It turned out that playing a rebellious youth with disdain for authority would be a perfect rehearsal for Star Trek.

Pine was about to start on another project with Joe Carnahan when he received a call from Abrams saying that he wanted him to reprise Captain James T Kirk. “To get a chance to work with JJ Abrams, who is on such a brilliant run, was impossible to pass up,” he says. “I was not a big Star Trek fan before getting involved in the project. I didn’t know too much about the mythology so working with JJ was the most pivotal part of the equation for me. Within five minutes of meeting him I knew that this was the type of director that I wanted to work with.”

Once Pine realised that he was going to play Captain Kirk he felt fear rather than elation: “At the beginning of the process I expressed my feelings of concern as I’d never done a film like this before. Here is a big tent-pole film, $150 million special effects, green screen, etc, etc, and I said, ‘All I want you to promise me is that if I have a question about a scene and a question about any moment, then you will give me that time so that I don’t feel like I’m being overwhelmed by the epic nature of the project’. He was totally true to his word. Any time, even in a scene where there is so much going on, he always had time to talk about the characters in the scene. This is why JJ is such a good person for a movie like this. It might be an action film but at the end of the day it is really character driven and because you care about the characters you care about the explosions.”

It’s also the reason why Star Trek is such a stunning film. It starts with a surprising sequence in which we see George Kirk, James T Kirk’s father, become a kamikaze pilot as the only means by which he can save his crew and his newborn son from certain death. We then cut forward a few years to Iowa and see a young and rebellious Jim Kirk stealing a car and being pursued by a RoboCop-style figure on a flying motorbike. It’s exhilarating stuff and immediately lets us know that this is Star Trek with its phasers set to stun.

Pine makes his entrance when he meets Uhura and starts a bar-room brawl with the crew from Star Fleet training. He is a man on edge and far from the image of the serene captain portrayed by Shatner.

Then again, as Pine surprisingly reveals, he didn’t use the legendary Shatner as his model at all. The actor admits that if there is a figure he modelled his Kirk on, it was, “definitely Harrison Ford, from both Indiana Jones and the Star Wars movies”.

He adds: “What Harrison Ford is so great at doing is bringing this quality that if he could be anywhere else at a moment of trouble he would be there… but he isn’t, he’s there and he has to figure out a way of dealing with it. I always loved that quality about him in Star Wars. The accidental hero, that is a good description. That’s not to say that I modelled my version of Kirk on anything he did in particular, but I wanted to bring that kind of humour to the character.”

In a surprising storyline that ensures that this new film runs parallel to the original Star Trek rather than replacing it, Kirk emerges as a robust hero – a maverick with an aptitude for brilliant snap decisions.

And Pine, who has signed up to star as the Green Lantern in a forthcoming adaptation of the classic comic book, argues that bringing humanity to an action hero is the only way to succeed.

“It is a big challenge for every movie to ensure that people connect with a hero,” he says. “It’s a kind of everyman quality that is needed. I’ve tried to bring as much of my own truth to Kirk as I’ve been able to.”