Chris Pine and his “really bad” audition for ‘Avatar’
In terms of his acting career, Chris Pine has done it all. After rising to prominence in the early 2000s, Pine has since starred as Captain Kirk in the Star Trek reboots, Steve Trevor in the DC Extended Universe, and even had a foray into musicals with 2014’s Into the Woods. Whilst Pine’s CV is glowing, according to the actor himself, there was once a possibility he could have added a pop culture leviathan to it: James Cameron’s Avatar. However, his audition was “pretty bad” and it still haunts him to this day.
Avatar, the 2009 science fiction movie starring Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Stephen Lang, Michelle Rodriguez and Sigourney Weaver, went on to achieve monumental success. The first instalment in the series, the film is set in the mid-22nd century, where we find humans colonising the habitable moon of Pandora to mine unobtanium. The expansion of the mining colony threatens the local Na’vi people, bringing them into an existential conflict with the humans. With inflation considered, Avatar is the second-highest-grossing film of all time.
When speaking to the Chicago Tribune in 2012 ahead of the release of the drama People Like Us, Chris Pine recalled his terrible Avatar audition, which he conceded would “haunt” him for the rest of his days. He explained that he didn’t really “buy it”, and this caused him to not believe in his convictions and mess up the opportunity to star in the hit movie.
He said: “I have a feeling that story will haunt me for the rest of my life. It’s one of these things—sometimes you can leave your car in Burbank, Los Angeles and walk into a conference room, and your back is sweating, and you’re thinking about the laundry you have to do, and somehow seamlessly, you can then pretend to be a man in a loincloth standing in front of blue people saying lines like, ‘Come follow me, I’ll save you!’ And sometimes you just can’t buy it”.
Pine continued: “I walked into that room absolutely not believing myself. How dare I put that poor casting director through the experience of watching me. Halfway through, I just kind of stopped; she was maybe smiling or laughing at me. I didn’t take offence to it because I realised I was probably pretty bad, and we just called it a day, and I shook hands with her and out I walked”.
