Dear Chris Pine,
We love you.
Sincerely, marie claire.
Just kidding! There’s more to this letter than just that. Chris, how do we love thee? Let us count the ways.
We certainly can’t be the only ones to have loved you since the Princess Diaries: A Royal Engagement days. Only you Chris, the Blue Eyed Boy, could turn that ridiculous uncalled for sequel into a bittersweet rumination on getting older. From then, you’ve made impeccable career choices, headlining the surprisingly good Star Trek reboots, played our guilty pleasure action hero of choice Jack Ryan – everybody’s favourite LSE student turned crack CIA agent – a dastardly secret agent thwarting Tom Hardy’s romantic endeavours in the terrible (or terribly good?) This Means War and sending up your Prince Charming persona in Into The Woods. Bonus points for this scene, which is everything, and will be on repeat in some circle of heaven whenever we get there.
So basically your movie choices are great. Thank you for years (and years and years) of cinematic joy.
But we think this year, your 36th, will be the best year of all. For it is in this year that you will take arms in the Wonder Woman film, surely the most hotly-anticipated movie in the marie claire office.
Of that film, where you play Steve Trevor, a man who will by stand by while Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman saves the world, you have been unapologetically feminist. And for that, we love you even more.
“It’ll be a fucking blast,” you said about your casting. “I couldn’t be happier to be supporting Gal in what’s going to be the first [DC] female-driven superhero film. I think in the world today we’ve had plenty enough of male-driven everything. It’s finally time to see how wonderful the world can be with beautiful, strong intelligent women kicking some major ass.”
It’s not the first time you went full feminist, and that’s simply another reason why you are our Forever Internet Boyfriend.
“The masculine footprint in the world is so violent and obviously it hasn’t relaly gotten us anywhere,” you said in an interview with Du Jour. “To have a strong woman [in action movies]… I think we can start injecting this world with a little bit more of the ideology of compassion, love and positive moral strength rather than something destructive.”
Chris, you are the male feminist hero we not only need and deserve, a man that is not afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve, and who will happily take a supporting role in a superheroine movie not because you want to endear yourself to the female audience – consider that ship to have well and truly sailed – but because you just love the team, damn it. And when that team includes a female director, who you loved working with and whose praises you have sung at ComicCons around the world, we just can’t help but love you more.
And who can forget that time when you shed one beautiful tear at last year’s Oscars, while Common and John Legend were performing the heart out of Selma’s hit single ‘Glory’. The Internet won’t let you forget it, and even though you took some heat for that truly handsome tear, you had a typical unapologetic response. “It was a wonderful performance and it was really moving… I would say as an actor, [that’s] the only time in my life that I think I will be able to produce a single tear down my face.”
You’re not afraid to completely re-write the rule books on masculinity. In fact, that’s something you actually said yourself – when appearing on the cover of Out magazine, you fantastic human – when you said “I think there’s a growing homogenisation of what masculinity means… Bare chested. Very tan. White. Brown hair, blue eyes, perfect skin. That is so… not real.”
You are the definition of an Internet Boyfriend. You are a “paragon of enlightened masculinity.” You have a degree from Berkeley – in English! For crying out loud! – you’re a student of cinema. You make the big blockbusters, sure, but you also take time to do theatre, which you’ve always said is your true passion. You’re favourite meal is a bottle of red wine and a bowl of pasta. You famously love words (like a good English major). You’re a friend to the LGBTQI community. You hug all of your fans, who call themselves by the adorable name the Pine-Nuts. You are a fan of period dramas, just like us.
“I just remember this shot of [the leading man] walking through the grass with the coattails and the white pants and the riding boots, walking through some English countryside,” you have said. “And I was like – goddamn. He is such a man! Strong and purposeful and going toward his beloved. I wanted to walk like that.”
So on that note: Happy birthday, Chris Pine. We love you.
Sincerely, marie claire*
*Okay, so no member of marie claire officially endorsed this article. My editor gave me (and I quote) “free reign”. And I definitely took it! Happy Birthday Chris Pine.
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