Chris Pine isn’t afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve. Though he plays fearless leader Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek Into Darkness, the sci-fi star tells the June issue of Men’s Health he’s not as macho as the character he portrays. “I cry all the time — at work, at the shrink’s, with my lady,” says the actor, who recently split with model Dominique Piek. “The Notebook killed me. Up destroyed me. Up was like the animated Amour.”
Another one of Chris’ fears? Mediocrity. “It’s the fear of not being as good as you want to be,” he says. “If you give over to that fear, it will sabotage you. As much as I can, I try to use that fear to guide me.”
When Chris auditioned for 2009’s Star Trek, he claims it went “as badly as you can imagine.” When he got a callback after bombing, he tried to make the most of his second chance. “When you want something enough, it brings out primal emotions,” he explains. “You get into this place of ‘must happen, must happen.'”
Growing up in L.A., the 32-year-old says he had trouble relating to his peers. “Just looking at a girl felt awkward,” Chris recalls. “When you feel like an oddball, it never really leaves you. Even now, I’m better around people who are uncomfortable with themselves, the misfits.”
He looked up to his actor father, Robert Pine, who played Sgt. Joseph Getraer on the NBC hit CHiPs. “Acting was work for him. It was a job. I always thought there was something great about that,” Chris tells the magazine. “Almost like you’re working in a bank. You don’t get carried away with yourself.”
The blue-eyed hunk adds that he’s always considered Robert to be his hero. “he leads with his heart,” Chris tells Men’s Health. “I have a memory of us fishing. It could be f-cking miserably boring, but he was totally invested in what this experience was going to be for me. His absolute dedication to my interest is what moves me when I look back on it.”
