With The Finest Hours, Chris Pine takes command of his career
The Star Trek actor is attracted to roles where ordinary men do extraordinary things, yet in his latest film the captain of The Enterprise is boldly going where he’s not gone before – portraying a man wrestling with fear
Chris Pine is carving out an interesting – and broad – career for himself playing military men. It started with taking on the role of Captain James T. Kirk for the reboot of the Star Trek franchise.
In his latest film, Pine is coxswain Bernie Webber, the man who commanded a small wooden Coast Guard vessel through hurricane winds and giant waves to save the crew of a sinking oil tanker in 1952.
It wasn’t the uniform that caught his eye. Pine was drawn to The Finest Hours by the driving action and uncomplicated story.
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“There is a simple elegance to it and I just liked that. It’s about ordinary men doing extraordinary things,” Pine says. “It’s also driven by a very strong romance.”
The role has him playing a leader of men again, but it couldn’t be any more different from the space ace he portrays on The Enterprise. He elected to play Webber as a man who wrestles with fear.
This rescue mission story is based on actual events. Pine was unable to talk to Webber, who died in 2009. That meant he had to depend on research, which revealed Webber dealt with a lot of issues, such as his brothers being second world war heroes while he never saw duty outside the United States.
A lot of Pine’s understanding of Webber came from an audio recording he was given where the hero talks about his life and that eventful mission.