In a recent interview with Esquire, actor Chris Pine answered the one question that has captivated the internet for months: Did Harry Styles spit on him at the Venice Film Festival? And if he did, well, why?
If you’re not up to speed on the never-ending drama of “spitgate,” then you might want to read this explainer first. It involves Pine and Styles, along with actor-director Olivia Wilde and actress Florence Pugh, and there are so many twists and turns to this rumor mill that it’s almost guaranteed to become a hit documentary one day.
Front and center in that documentary will no doubt be what’s happening now: the moment Pine stepped out of the shadows, months later, to set the record straight.
Well, sort of.
Chris Pine clears the air on the Harry Styles spitgate drama
If you’re hoping to get a dramatic story, you might want to temper your expectations. Pine immediately shut down the ongoing, widely believed theory that Style spit on him in a movie theater before the screening of Don’t Worry Darling.
“Harry did not spit on me,” he said. “Harry’s a very, very kind guy.”
Pine then explained what, exactly, was taking place between the two of them in that moment. It has something to do with an inside joke, a phrase they would say to one another: “It’s just words, man.”
“We had this little joke because we’re all jet-lagged,” Pine said. “We’re all trying to answer these questions. And sometimes when you’re doing these press things, your brain goes befuddled and you start speaking gibberish. But it’s just words, man.”
When he re-watched the video of the non-incident, Pine admitted that it “does indeed look like he’s spitting on me,” but clarifies, “He didn’t spit on me.”
Pine was less willing to dive into the other countless rumors swirling around the Don’t Worry Darling cast. But he did say this:
“If there was drama, there was drama…I absolutely didn’t know about it, nor really would I have cared. If I feel badly, it’s because the vitriol that the movie got was absolutely out of proportion with what was onscreen. Venice was normal things getting swept up in a narrative that people wanted to make, compounded by the metastasizing that can happen in the Twittersphere. It was ridiculous.”
Here’s what Chris Pine was actually looking at in that now-infamous photo from the film festival
Pine did address another moment at the Venice Film Festival that went absolutely viral: a picture of him at the press conference for Don’t Worry Darling, in which he looked, shall we say, uninterested.
“All the memes I saw about my face in Venice made me f*cking laugh,” he said. But he insisted that his facial expression was only an indication of jet lag, not some deeply embedded resentment. Oh, and his interest in the ceiling. “Sometimes the question’s not that interesting,” he said, “and you just f*cking zone out, and you’re looking at a ceiling because it’s really pretty.”
“It should be known,” Pine went on, “that the press conferences in Venice are in one of the most gorgeous buildings I’ve ever seen and the ceilings are like blue with gold gilt. So there’s one of these [memes] where I’m looking up, and what I’m really thinking is, ‘How can I do that to my ceiling?’ That’s what was going through my head.”
Alas: It looks like celebrity gossip isn’t always as juicy as it may seem.
