Chris Pine chats with OUT Magazine

Shana Naomi Krochmal has written an outstanding cover story on Chris Pine for the latest issue of Out Magazine.

It’s a good thing I didn’t know their chat took place at the Intelligensia coffee house in Silver Lake because it’s just a few blocks from my house and I would’ve walked by several times and gawked!

I didn’t realize a pre-stardom Chris had starred as a gay man in the TV movie Surrender Dorothy with Diane Keaton.

He says: “My first intimate scene [onscreen] was with Tom Everett Scott. He’s an incredible spooner — very warm, very sensitive.”

Here’s some excerpts from the section about Star Trek co-star Zachary Quinto.

Of Quinto being gay: “It was something that I knew about Zach from the moment I met him. It was just who Zach was and that’s that. I’m sensitive, and I don’t ever want to make anyone feel uncomfortable. Knowing that for Zach it was more about a career thing and that he was not comfortable at the time coming out — it was fine. It was something that we kind of tiptoed around and I just took it as a given, because that’s what he wanted.”

On Quinto coming out publicly in the fall of 2011: “So happy for him, oh man. I thought it was rad. It was really, really cool. He did it on his own time, on his own schedule. And Jonathan [Groff], who he’s dating, is such a lovely man. He’s a good guy and a great actor, and they make a fantastic couple. I couldn’t have been happier for Zach.”

On the Kirk and Spock bromance: “I always thought about it more like it was the dialectic of a human being. One couldn’t be more logic and reason — that’s his genetic coding. And the other is more impulsive, following his passion, his fists. That was how it was a functional relationship. You have Spock as the cold reason, you had the passion of Jim Kirk, and then you had the ironic sarcasm of McCoy, which gave the whole thing levity. That dynamic was beautiful.”

“That relationship is the core of what Kirk goes through,” Pine adds. “The arc and the trajectory of his journey is huge, almost Greek. But it’s through his relationship with Spock that he learns the greatest lessons, about loving someone to the point of being able to do away with all rules and regulations and constraints in order to save, protect, and do justice to your friend.”

Pine has not yet booked his next gig. He wanted to be in Ryan Murphy’s HBO adaptation of The Normal Heart, but the schedule didn’t work. “I would have done that in a fucking heartbeat,” he says. “Right now I just want to play good roles, and if the role happens to be a gay man, that’s not of any import other than is it a good story? Does it say something that’s interesting?”

It’s not hard for him to imagine a time — maybe soon, maybe five years from now — when a big, smart action movie also (finally) goes gay. “All it really takes is the fact that the man isn’t going home to his wife, but has a boyfriend at home,” he says. “I think it would be a wonderful thing to see.”