Chris Pine

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dan Rather and I'm joined by Monica Monsoon. Handsome actor alert.

Big time.

Trigger warning, if you get horny too easy at work, don't listen to this one.

You might need to wait.

This was a great one.

It was really, really fun.

It really, really was.

He's so interesting.

He is insanely interesting. You'll hear about it. I thought he hated me. Maybe he was, I'd love that he admitted he was judgmental of me. Such music to my ears to hear.

You hear that in a little bit of a way that.

Isn't there.

Is a little bit of a stretch.

Okay, that's fine. I'll let the listener decide.

Yes, exactly.

But these are my favorite kind of interviews. They happen occasionally where it's like, I got a story about somebody. Maybe they have a story about me. And then we chat and we like each other so much. He's so smart, Chris Pine.

Very smart.

Ran out of the gates. I'm like, Berkeley, okay. Yeah. Okay, Berkeley. And then a story I would have never guessed and unraveled every story.

You really went nuts over a piece of this. No. Which you'll hear.

Yes, I unraveled. Yeah. In the best way. Oh, I love it.

What you think about people is not always the truth.

I'm so wrong. It's insane. You would think I would learn to stop guessing, but no.

No, you never stop. And keep guessing.

Because I get it right one in five times. And I'm like.

And that's enough for you.

That's enough. I'll stick with those. Of course, Chris Pine was in Star Trek, Wish, Wonder Woman, Dungeons and Dragons. As my kids now are very acutely aware, The Princess Diaries. He has a new movie out that he wrote and directed, called Pool Man, out May 10th.

He's an armchair expert.

He's an armchair expert.

Nice to meet you.

You son of a bitch. Look what you just arrived in. Is that a 69-ish?

It is indeed.

That is gorgeous.

$30,000 original model.

Oh, have you heard that? In the green. I love the green.

I've had it for like probably seven years. And then, right before COVID hit, I got nearly T-bone. I was working on this film and this woman came through red and at 45 almost basically killed me. But she clipped the back. Then they had to take it all apart.

What is it, a four-speed?

No, it's a five-speed.

I don't have any old, cool Porsches. I had a 911 for a while. My buddy wanted it. in Michigan. I collect station wagons.

Oh, I have one. You do? The other one, Jeep Wagoneer.

Oh, okay, great.

Blue on wood panel.

Wait, this has to be on air.

You guys are talking too much.

Mine was favorite topic.

We're attracting a lot of car guys these days.

Have you ever met Jonah Nolan?

Very briefly, he and his wife. Is he a car guy too?

Yeah, we just interviewed him and he rolled up in an Ariel Atom, one of those crazy- Oh my God. Yeah, no roof.

It was really cool.

Yes.

I'm a pretty basic dude when it comes to it. I have a 57 Speedster that I wanted ever since I saw an Atom 210..

Yes, of course, Dylan drove it.

Dylan drove it. I was like, I have to have it. I have a 280SL.

The little convertible. That was on a show too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's LA law, but that's like-.

He had a 560.

That could actually be a Porsche. I was thinking shampoo.

Oh, sure, sure, sure. Can I tell you right now, looking at you and the car you've arrived in, which is so gorgeous and you're very stylish. I've been watching a lot of interviews with you. Thanks, man. You have a lot of style and I say it sincerely.

Fashion guy.

If you don't already own a BMW 3.

3.

It screams you.

Forever, I'm a huge fan. My first car, so everybody in my high school, I went to a very she-she high school here called Oakwood, and so everybody was getting their big fancy. At that point, it was the-.

Escalades?

Maxima.

Oh, okay, the Nissan Maxima. Supra.

Prelude was big, but my grandmother left me a little cash. It was like $750 and I bought a 1972 2002, which is a beautiful car.

What's that?

Are you not so-.

You just have so many numbers.

Okay, so the BMW 2002 is, other than the 3.

I think the 3.

More James Bond-y.

100%. 2002 is like the precursor to the 3.0 series.

But it had so much personality.

And the reason why I got into it is because a guy on my street had an Alpina version of it.

It's where all my car work's done.

And I think he ended up selling it, but I fucking dream of that car.

And you got it for $750?

All told, it was probably $1,500.

Stick shift? Of course. Yes. So slow. Yeah.

Yeah, it's got five. You know. I mean, I'm a little embarrassed. I had a flip phone for many years, which I was very proud of.

Right.

I just saw Dune and you know, Stone Starsguard is that giant man with tubes coming out of him and he sits in a pile of oil.

Does he need to stay damp? We need to get into that. But I'm trying to think, is he like, have a moisturizer? How does it work? Yeah.

I think to myself, this march of technology is essentially getting us to a place, either consciously or not, where that is what we become. Just people on a couch, where everything's done for us. Wall-E.

Goes back to Wall-E. Goes back to Idiocracy. Frito. I've got everything I need. I'm sitting on a toilet.

So my point being, I like things that have a little bit of difficulty. Even the simple difficulty of, it's a little hard to start the car in the morning. And if it's a little hard, you gotta kinda spend some time with it. And you gotta warm it up. And if it's not moving, you gotta check the choke.

You wanna be involved.

Yeah, I wanna have the tactility of life, of like a bit more. Friction. Yeah, a little bit of inertia.

I agree. I want to have some ownership over the experience. If it just is delivered to my eyes and my ears, I don't have the pride in having participated in it.

When I say this, I'm talking about the iPhone.

Because you don't have a flip phone, but that also doesn't.

No, it's just a little baby iPhone.

Oh, it's a baby iPhone. Okay.

Even something as simple as Google Maps, which I use all the time. But think about all of the magic, faded experiences that it's maybe denying us by just giving us the directions. So we're just looking at this whole thing rather than, you know what, I think I'm gonna cut down Spalding.

You'll like this. I just pitched to my 11-year-old, we're gonna go to Europe. And I was telling her, what I used to love is I would go places and you'd leave your hotel and you would just get lost because you didn't really know. And then you might consult a map at some point, but that was so fun. And she goes, oh, that does sound really fun.

Look, I have nothing against maps.

Yeah, we don't hate maps.

But an actual map is also kind of fun.

And then trying to fold it back up in the way originally.

If you're an anxious person, you love maps.

I am completely an anxious person. You are? Oh my God, yeah.

Getting lost sounds rough to me.

That's part of the cognitive, behavioral life. discipline work of being an angsty person is like working through it and be like, we're going to go get lost. And it's totally okay. And if we don't get to dinner at 7.15, that's fine too. If we even lose the reservation, that's fine.

Yes, it took me six months to get the reservation. So I can't lose it, sorry.

So maybe we just do take the Uber.

Yeah, that's right.

You're right, I don't have a lot of anxiety and I'm quick to go like, yeah, and then I'll be somewhere else.

You've never had anxiety?

I have it at night. when I'm sleeping. I wake up and I obsess on things.

Have you ever had performance anxiety getting on stage as a comedian?

Doing standup, yes, not sketch comedy. That was fine, because I had friends, and if we ate shit.

Kind of a structure.

Well, we would share in the embarrassment and someone's there to help, maybe, I guess, if things go sideways. But when I did start doing standup very late into this.

So you didn't start out doing it?

No, I moved here to do standup and I was just too afraid. And I discovered the groundlings. Oh, you can do it with other people. That's not as scary. And then I fell in love with that.

I'm curious, because I think it comes back around to having made this film. It's a version of the naked vulnerability. I would imagine comedians much more so. And I've only done it once. years ago, when I was at the Williamstown Theater Festival.

But you also did The Atheist as a one-man show.

To stand up on stage and you are looking at everybody and you're registering energy, there is a level of courage there. And, I also think, a building up of thick skin that I admire so much, you just have to bowl through.

I'm sure we admire the same thing. It's specifically comedians that are on stage, their pace is so calm and slow. That's the ones where I'm like, oh my God. You're not nervous at all. I know that this goes at this speed and eventually everyone will be happy.

I'm assuming you've been on stage when it hasn't worked.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What does that experience like?

Oh, my God, what an experience. What happens is, you're like, well, this is terrible. I will continue. You're above yourself, listening to yourself. go through the rest of it, as you're just staring at the audience, somehow in your third eye.

Some people like it, though. They like to bomb. We've had a few people on who've said that there's something about the bombing that gets them revved up.

I almost think they're the real comedian. Like. I think that's what they have, that I don't.

Unpack that a bit more. I don't totally understand that.

I don't really get it, except I experienced it when I read a mean comment once on Instagram, where I was like, I think this is what they mean. You get so uncomfortable by people being mad that it almost makes you lean into them, hating you and just being like, okay, you hate me. I'm gonna double down on this.

You may be a survival.

I think that's a tricky, cause. I've had a year to think about it. after I finished my film, which has brought up a lot of stuff. I have this vision of this samurai, emotional ninja in my mind. There is no good.

It's nitrous.

It's like addiction. It's that serotonin hit of like, woo. But there's that ninja samurai, other thing of like, that's cool, man. I don't know how effective, impractical that is for the comedian on stage, but I think there's like a life lesson. Anyway.

Yeah, it's best case.

I'm going off into the weeds here. It's best case.

This happened to me, Vegas Grand Prix. So six months ago, I did a live show with my Formula One podcast and it was in front of this crazy rowdy bar audience that had no idea who we were, had never heard. the show, didn't like Formula One. And it was a disaster. People were actively coming up on stage and just grabbing pictures with me in the middle of the whole thing.

No, I'm not on the F1 podcast.

She was spared.

Our shows go great.

Lazy boys in Los Feliz.

When we would do live shows, yeah, they go a lot better, but this was a humongous disaster. I don't know if I know the real kink of those comedians, but what did happen to me is I was like, this is unsalvageable and we have committed to an hour. That's what we were hired to do. It's going to be the longest next 55 minutes of my life. But I did have the presence of mind to go, you're going to remember this for life.

For the memoir.

Us four will be talking about this experience for the next five days.

And like, if it had gone easy, you'd forget it. 100%.

So I did have that where I was like, oh man, we've got a story to tell for the next couple of weeks.

There's definitely a cache there. Yeah.

I don't know if that's the ninja place to be, but there was some kind of like, looking at the bigger picture, maybe in the moment.

Well, there's a version of my emotional ninja samurai, which is you just spin it a different way. To Viktor Frankl of it all.

Who's Viktor Frankl?

When I was 15, my mom gave me this book, Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. He was a Holocaust survivor. This is obviously the extreme version of a bad situation, but it's all about reframing perspective. It's like, how can you be immersed and enmeshed in the absolute worst thing? And do you have the power to reframe it, to experience it differently?

Yeah. Okay, mom was an actress and then became a psychotherapist.

Yeah. My grandmother was an actress in the 30s and 40s and she was from Corpus Christi, Texas. She was a beauty queen. redhead. Came out to Los Angeles in 32, maybe.

Which is now almost entirely Latino. Exactly right. Nicotine toothpicks?

100%. I already clocked your lozenges.

We gotta put a button on all this, which is like I've come across you a couple times and I really thought, I don't think this guy likes me. And now, with the Porsche and the nicotine, I'm feeling like what a missed opportunity.

Sure, you have friendship in it? Why do you think it's a sense that I didn't like you?

We'll get into that later. Oh, I can't wait.

Never seen those toothpicks other than in your pocket.

The story about this is, I was making a movie and I'm on hour 19 or whatever, and you're overdoing fucking Wordle. or when I have my 19 cigarette and I'm like, toothpicks, man, nicotine fucking toothpicks. And I hopped right on the phone, I called my business manager,

I was like, let's do this now.

Let me just take a quick beat, check Google, if anything's out there. Of course.

There's 12 products in the market.

Nicotine toothpicks. It was my tequila and I got fucking shot down.

I do that too, I invent shit and then I look and it's like, it's everything.

Anyway, they have my mom, and my mom grew up in Beverly Hills.

Max was successful as a lawyer.

He was kind of on and off successful. I guess he produced a couple of things with my grandma. He ended up becoming the president of the Beverly Hills Bar and he died very young. So I don't really have many stories of him, but my mom grew up in this really interesting community in Beverly Hills in the fifties. She went to school with everyone.

And they were all concentrated.

Yeah, it was the studio system. And then, yeah, she became an actress and worked at the Mark Taper Forum when they had a repertory company in the late sixties, early seventies, did a ton of television and met my father in 64.. And my father come out from Scarsdale, New York. My father's full name is Granville Whitelaw Pine.

Wow.

Oh, my goodness. Granny.

Granny, that's cute.

No one ever calls it. They call him Robert or Buzz.

Does he have grandkids and do they call him Grandy?

Grandpa Granny. That would be good, Grandpa Granny.

Grandpa Granny. No, Luca calls him Pops.

This is your sister's child? Yeah.

And then both my parents were actors and my mom, I think the last thing she did was Masters of the Universe in 1984.

Okay. Why did she choose to end that experience and go into psychotherapy?

She quit acting kind of ostensibly in 1980, when I was born. My father was doing very well. He was on a TV show called Chips and it was number one on NBC and it was a big deal. You know, Dex did a remake of Chips.

Oh, that's right. Oh my God.

That is fucking right.

Oh my God. I learned something very painfully, what you just had to say, a very popular show named Chips. I found that out the hard way, that people currently today don't know about Chips.

Oh, well, I mean, it's like now 40 years ago.

When we were recruiting people to go to the screens, they were like, that was so literal. It's about potato chips?

Like, no, man.

Come on, California Highway Patrol.

Larry Wilcox, Eric Estrada.

How old are you? I'm five years older than you.

So we're around the same time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, certainly if your father's on the show too, you're uniquely aware of it. Yeah. How long did that run? Less than I thought when I got into remaking it.

Five or six years, I think. 76 or 77 to 81..

Okay, so for me, that was half of my whole childhood. So it seems like that show was on for 10 years. Yeah. But times were good, I imagine, when dad was on that show.

Yeah, I mean, I was like a guppy. I don't really remember anything of those years other than we had a nice house and we lived, as my mom called it, south of the boulevard, which is a big deal in Los Angeles, south of Ventura Boulevard. Had the Gelson's card, had the Neiman's card. It was the golden years of network television too. So it's like when you went to Upfronts back east, they fly you first and they give you per diem and the limos and all that.

It's like a finishing school for actors.

Yeah, and that's what the studio system was. Like, you got paid to be under a contract at Universal and you were just kind of on call for their casting directors to call you up to say, go out for The Virginian, go out for Gunsmoke. And they did really well through the 70s and actually did a pilot with Michael Douglas called Streets of San Francisco.

My mother saw them filming it while on a trip to San Francisco while I was in her belly. She tells this story all the time and she saw Michael Douglas on a sidewalk, and it's like the highlight of her life.

Oh, my God, dude.

There's time.

There's our 50s.

Yeah, exactly, plenty of time. We waited until we were both gray. Let's go.

Both gray, you have all your-.

But listen, the sides are completely gray and when this grows out, it just gets grayer and grayer. I'll grant you that you're ahead of me. I don't know about it. Okay.

And then, going into the 80s, it got rougher and rougher. My dad, the work got sparser and sparser and then the real estate crash in 87 or 88 pretty much wiped my family out. Then it was some really rough years and then my mom went back to school. I have so much respect for what she did. She went back to UCLA and got her BA.

Really quick, in a way. your dad lives out this fear I walk around with, which would be I would return to civilian life, but people would remember me.

That's terrifying.

You can't do it anonymously. You can't just go, hey, I'm gonna take care of my family and go, do this thing. People are gonna be like, hey, you were the sergeant. Chips.

The kind of deep respect I have for my father now becoming a man, because I think I'm still becoming a man, to know what he had to do for his family, it requires a strength and a humility. I don't know if I would have that similar strength.

I think the majority of folks that found themselves in that situation just self-destruct. They can't do it. They would crawl into a bottle.

And my family, despite certain emotional fissures that 25 years of therapy, I still probably deal with, they stuck together. They put two kids through college, in private school, put my mother through school, paid off their debts.

It's deeply admirable.

It's beyond.

I think I admire that version of humility almost more than anything else. That would be so hard for me.

That would be painful for me. What I'm really thankful for in terms of the gift that it gave me, is that I have a deep respect for the fickleness of the business. I have a deep understanding of how very quickly it can go, how very good it can be, and how very quickly people are not returning your phone calls. The idea of what's authentic and what's not, and what's business and what's true friendship, my radar is keenly set to that. And also, I hope, a deep appreciation, for, I have a Porsche, because I remember my father in the good years had this beautiful 65, 365 SC.

Oh, my God, I get it so much. I'm in many ways living out my father's dream right now. And I think of him. I remember he and I were watching Blow. There's a moment where Johnny Depp invites his dad over to look at the house and the cars.

Oh, so you shared the car thing with your dad. Yeah.

All this bullshit I have gives me X amount of pleasure. I thought it would give me more, but I let my dad come in the gates and look around and I go, no, we're going to keep all this shit. Cause. I want him to come in the gates and go, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You want him to be proud.

Yes. And I want to live out his fantasy and mine.

But I think it's maybe something more than pride. There's a deep sharing. There's like a, you did good. This is for us boys and their dads. It doesn't get more primal than that.

And boys and their dads, and girls and their moms.

It's all complex.

It's all a complex, for sure.

As your mother picked up these skills in psychotherapy and she mastered that, did you A, witness an evolution in her and how she dealt with things? And did it impact how your family operated? Like she went out and got a pretty awesome skillset. I have to imagine the Annette Bening character in this movie is some, whether conscious or unconscious, nod to mom.

It's very interesting thinking about coming on this podcast and thinking about doing these long form things. I promise you this is a roundabout way of answering your question.

We have all the time.

I listened to your story about your addiction, specifically the moment, day seven. And I thought that is a fucking courageous thing to do. It's a really tough thing to do. And, as you said on the podcast, which I find very moving and very specifically to my point, it's one thing, just you two and Kristen. It's another thing.

Also, everyone's alive.

Yeah, everyone's alive. So what's fair, what's respectful, what's your right to do that? How can you be authentic and have a true conversation? I've said I'd come on this show and bring my full self to bear in a way that I can live with, but also-.

No, it's very tricky.

It's very tricky.

It is, I acknowledge it.

But my question for you, because I really am so curious, is like, how did you make the decision to do that? Not specifically only day seven, but to be that open, essentially from what I can gather, and I don't know you well, but 24, seven with many different facets of your life.

I would say first, just AA. So I've been going AA for 20 fucking years, coming up in September. And so I've gotten used to saying out loud these terrible things I did, thought, or perpetrated on other people, expecting everyone there to shun me and exclude me and ostracize me, and actually seeing through practice looks of recognition, comfort, a calming, I guess like immersion therapy. I had to do it over and over again. And then, lo and behold, opposite of my expectation, it's always been met with understanding.

But I was gonna say, AA is one thing, a community built on precisely what you've just described. The inner web and the noxious soup that that is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Is definitely not that. No. I mean, or is it?

I will say the day seven thing, and I wanna, again, give credit to Bradley Cooper, because I, of course, called him and said, hey, I relapsed, I have a new date. And he said, what are you going to do about your show? Because you talk so much about being sober for, at that time, 17 years or 16 years. 16.. 16, yeah.

And also, who fucking cares? It's also, it's one of my favorite words, the solipsistic, all of a sudden you're like, everybody's fucking talking about this.

Yes. Yuck, man. Yeah, when your movie doesn't open, like you, walk down the street and you're convinced everyone read the fucking Hollywood Reporter this morning. I remember going on that set at Parenthood, just thinking every crew member feels so bad for me right now and half of them didn't even know I had a movie that came out.

Oh, that's very helpful, I appreciate that. That makes a lot of sense.

I want to let you off the hook. A, this is what I do. So like, whatever cost it may create on an acting front, is no longer of concern of mine.

You don't act anymore at all?

I haven't for a couple years and I don't intend to. I do this, we do three episodes a week, I love it. I'm doing my favorite part of acting, which is shooting the shit with you at Video Village. Truly, I just don't have to go through makeup or have a wardrobe fitting. I've got just the thing I love the most about it.

That sounds pretty great, I'll be honest.

So by no means do I expect anyone that comes on here to have the same level.

No, but I read your mission statement.

Oh God, it's very old. The messiness of being human, we've cut that.

We're a little embarrassed about it now.

But I wouldn't be. You know how it is, doing. press for shit frankly sucks most of the time. If I read another GQ article about, they tried to put him in a box, but then they showed him all the different.

Yeah, Chris Pine is saying not anymore. He's like, ah, can't shoot me.

But I also don't wanna be that asshole, that doesn't show up.

Yeah, you can't be above it, you gotta sell your stuff.

It's not that, you just wanna show up and be like, yeah, I'm gonna have a real, legit conversation with you and not bar myself. Anyway, I've been in a whole meditative cycle about these podcasts. I've never done them before, and it's such a different art form, as you know, than doing bits on a talk show at night.

What scares you? Is it the actors thing, about? if people know too much, then it's hard to transcend that in a role. or is it just people will come for me?

No, I mean, obviously. I think that's proven, obviously to be not an issue in today's age where the oversharing of everything is owned by everybody on the planet. So it's like, we're all in the soup together. It's a good question, I wanna probe it a little bit. Someone asked me like, why'd you become an actor?

I love this. So this is the thing I still struggle with and police myself about and check in with all the time. That's why day seven is something I don't like talking about, weirdly, even though I put it out, because I know me, it sounds like we're similar, I don't want it to become a story I tell and I've figured the beats out to, and I can deliver and entertain you and get approval. I don't wanna dishonor it by making it that. And I don't want to make my life and my real fears and concerns and thoughts and the things I care about, I also don't wanna commodify those and monetize those and exploit those.

It's interesting too, I find, for someone as myself who came into it so insecure, we didn't really wanna be looked at, I hold both introvert and extrovert.

Can I ask really quick, just so I understand that part a little bit more? You were super handsome in high school, weren't you?

I was not, I had awful cystic acne at 15, which, for anyone out there that's ever experienced it, I think you know is-.

Horrific. Time to pop up.

Yeah, not my time, cystic acne.

Yeah, I also fully-.

You get it.

I still have big hormonal bouts. Yeah. I froze my eggs a couple of times and after that, there was a big hormonal flux and I was like, I'm back to being that teenager and it sucks. I mean, it is crippling.

Emotionally crippling.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

I find it odd that, you know, there's obviously talk about many things, people with problems with obesity or struggling with their sexuality. It seems like we're maybe turning a page in that, but no one ever talks about, I feel like it's considered banal or a part of childhood or adolescence, but if you've dealt with a severe case of it, or even a mild case of it, there's no hiding at all.

Nope.

It's certainly crafted in great part the human I am. For me, it was like an emotional armoring. I had this great moment with this actor once and I met him, hi, how are you? God, man, I'm a big fan of your work. I think you're a great actor.

Yeah, like you're marching through a battlefield or something.

Every social interaction is going to be brutal, and I'm gonna be watching it the whole time and I will mimic what it's like to be just another kid. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the level of exhaustion, then, that you have, I can only talk about my experience, but doubly so, triply. so, you feel like you've been flattened by an 18-wheeler at the end of the day. So, to answer your question, I was not.

I think it's like comforting and shocking. how many people feel that, like when I look back on high school, I'm like, is it a miracle anyone ever even showed up? Because everyone had some weird thing. It seems like maybe these jocks seem to have it made. I don't know, from my perspective, they look like they're having a good time.

I wouldn't, you couldn't fucking pay me anything.

Yeah, a billion dollars.

You feel like you have a great time in high school? No. College? No.

If you were this handsome in high school, you might not have gone to Berkeley.

I was geared from a very young age to do well. I was a really good boy. I behaved and then I had my delayed adolescence at like 30 for a good 10 years.

Sure, sure.

Which nearly took me down. I've studied, I love to read. Because again, I was part introvert, part extrovert. I carried that introvert long before the acting. The acting just basically exploded it steroidally to a degree where it was a matter of going out to lunch or finding the darkest corner to go to to, like study a sonnet or something.

But don't you think, okay, so this is just tying back into the validation thing, because someone told you you're handsome and talented. To me, like a physical compliment is, unfortunately, I know, logically wrong, the highest compliment.

No, you're probably right. So that was 15 on and off until I was about 22.. But when I went to college and started acting, I was probably 19.. So yeah, that's for you. Because, again, the PTSD that I had was very real.

I've been needing, I've been dying for this.

I feel fraudulent because I didn't have the cystic, but I'm telling you. Don't do this. Hold on, you know we relate on this. I hate to say it, but if someone was going to say, either Dex is a genius, he's a great father, or he's hot, I would want to hear hot.

I'm a great actor.

Terrible.

What about cars? You got to throw that in there. Great cars. Great drivers.

But yeah, man, it's so real. It's crazy.

It's crazy.

What's fascinating, though, is I don't know any of that about you. I see you for the first time in Star Trek, and I'm like, this asshole.

Yeah, he's so handsome.

How dare this fucking guy? I'm like, immediately I'm angry. God damn it, if I look like that, I feel like I could maybe be the lead of Star Trek.

So my relationship with you,

so then I'm curious, with that background, did you ever feel like you were playing the character of the handsome guy? Oh my God. Of course. Oh my God, this is crazy. No one's winning.

we're taking this princess away from you. For my experience, my first job in a film was as a prince.

Prince's Diaries?

Which is like, we're only less than 10 years from what was so traumatic, and people are like, you're the handsome guy, and I'm like, are you high?

Right. You're the prince someone would dream of.

There's no way I can live up to that, because I haven't lived up to that in my own sense of self.

You know the truth, in quotes.

So then, when you're then introduced to the bombardment of, then people commenting and criticizing and people are commenting on your acne scars or whatever, I conflate everything to being not good enough, which I'm already feeling inside anyway. So it's like, fuck all y'all. I didn't ask for this fucking thing. I was pretty convinced I was gonna be doing these character parts. So that cognitive dissonance was something I really had to wrestle with for a while.

Well, that's it. Did you watch the Phil Stutz, Jonah Hill, doc?

No, I am curious about it, though.

Sounds like you've already done this work. The part that just made me cry is he's bringing out a picture of Jonah as a young boy, very overweight. And they're discussing that the shadow's born there. And Phil says, basically, he wants you to invite him to where you guys have gone. That's why he's still battling you, because you haven't invited a man.

Bring along the shy boy and just be like, isn't it a gas, man? Ultimately, isn't it so fun? Because the fight has a lot to do with the boy and the shame and the self-flagellation, the not enough and all of that stuff that we know. What happens in that circumstance, at least for me at 15, is the armoring is rigid and it was super helpful. It saved my life, I'm sure.

And trust the good stuff a little bit more?

I don't know if I'm quite there yet, because that's its own separate form of childhood complexes, which really was born from just seeing lack and the fear of lack and the disappearance of enough. So that's its own bag.

Yeah, waiting for the other shoe to drop all the time.

I would say 15, 27,, 30, and then 40 through 44 have been deep moments. And I think this one right now is just a real reevaluation. And it's certainly Maslow's hierarchy. And I realize it's Cadillac problems. I feel like I need to preface it always with that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The opening of the matrix. And I was trying to explain to someone, and I think it's a pretty good metaphor. Whereas before life felt like you're in a huge ocean, but there are buoys everywhere. First job, first house, working with so-and-so. And they're focalizing and they are flow state.

So I love that we're talking, because I was in the exact same spot, at the exact same age, virtually. And I relate so deeply. It's like, we need a whole new reason to do anything. And that's terrifying. But I think in a bizarre way, of all the gifts, it seems like we've been given, the ultimate gift of excessive good luck.

As I said, it's like, kind of like problems. But I think it's even deeper.

Yeah, yeah.

Your needs and wants.

My needs and wants are met. So it is a gift to be able to be like, I have an opportunity as a self-artist now to shape things as I want. But that kind of breadth of choice is almost paralyzing because it's so much nicer to be like, I really want this film to do well. I could probably have said the same thing 10 years ago and been probably as articulate about these things as I am now. But experientially, I think I could have deluded myself to say, no, I took the job because of X, Y, and Z.

Yes, and you also wanna hold on to them. I can get myself in a situation where it's like, I'm gonna transcend everything. And then I go, and then why am I here?

That's the thing too, is we gotta transcend the ego. It's like, I don't fucking think you actually want to transcend the ego.

Exactly, what's the point?

Well, there's a whole bunch of reasons why it's there. Of course, we're gonna wanna be liked by people. We're social creatures. And if you're on the fucking Serengeti and you're not liked, guess who they're fucking leaving behind? Just starve, you're dead.

It's not frivolous status.

It's balance. I have to pee, but that- Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Great. Oh my God, I get to pee in front of all of you? No, no, we'll step back.

All good? Yeah.

Are you interested in these?

Have you gotten into these at all?

Oh, I love those. After many years of not searching for a few shapes,

big news.

That's breaking news. Did you stop because of the gas?

I just stopped because I stopped lifting,

but you know, they're saying that, yeah. What do you read out, Liv? Yeah.

He says don't do it?

No, put on muscle. Because you're gonna decline at a predictable rate.

And you say to eat the same amount of grams of protein as you weigh poundage? It's ridiculous.

It's hard.

Do you do it?

I wanna say yes, because that is my goal. And I say probably four days a week I do, and certainly three days a week. Like today, we're recording you, and then we're gonna record for three hours with arm cherries. I can't meet my protein needs if you're taking a four hour chunk out without eating. Because then you gotta eat like 85 grams of protein on setting or something.

One egg is eight grams of protein.

I know. You know what's a hack, though? Do you do the good culture cottage cheese? That has 48 grams of protein in one tub. And I can definitely pound one of those effortlessly, and I love it.

It is, it's a lot of work. It is.

And then you end up like me, you figure out what works and you just can't deviate. So I eat the exact same thing every single day, seven days a week, virtually.

I don't know if I have that kind of discipline. This dog picture is driving me.

Oh great. This one?

You're the only person who's fixed it, besides you.

But people complain in the pictures, fellow OCD people. And if I sit over there, yeah, it drives me nuts. I can also take it completely off the wall.

No, I like.

I like the wall. Okay, it feels good. I bump it with my lazy boy. is what happens. And then it gets askew.

Yeah, it's a good talk.

I really, really like it. That's why I love hearing people's stories, because it's like, there's no way I would have imagined that when I'm watching Star Trek. And I'm like, yeah, of course this guy has this movie.

Most people think that way.

That's wild, isn't it? Self-perception versus witnessing and being witnessed, right? It's like a primary need. So it starts with kid at the breast with mom. You're looking and being witnessed.

Yeah.

I hate to ask this question because again, I don't want to get you into too much self-exposing, but I was wrestling with similar feelings as you. Talk about the armor you put on in the character I was playing. And then, the first time, I drank beer,

I was like, okay, I get it now.

This is what we've been trying to feel like. The amount of relief. And I think, as I've known so many addicts and feel like I understand it. I'll give you one second story that really sums it up. My best friend, Aaron Weakley, his fucking childhood was so gnarly.

that was his primary thing?

Well, just at a point in ninth grade, that's what he had access to all the time. He kept a fucking gas can in his locker in ninth grade and got thrown out of school. But the key thing about that, as I'm now older and I look at that, that high was preferable to status quo.

And that's saying something.

Which says a lot. If you've ever huffed gas, it's miserable. Notion that that would be preferable.

Cool, because you're just basically cutting oxygen off to your brain to stop thinking.

And giving yourself a headache, but even the headache's a better distraction than the other stuff. to me. Really frames addiction, the relief aspect of it. And you can almost see how gnarly someone's life was by what they were even willing to get addicted to.

The greatest thing I read about it, this woman wrote something, I forget the name of it, but she's like, the hardest thing about addiction is 5 p.

It works every time. It's the most dependable friend I have. But I'm just curious, when you were young and you were dealing with all that, did you have that experience where you drank, or you smoked weed, or you did something, and you were just like, oh, relief. I'm not like thinking of this.

No, I was such a good boy. It was when I was 30, looking back now, I was having a drink every night. Love of scotch. And then 30 was really go time in Exploreville. That hit a wall when I was about 39..

Thank God. That's a good run, nine years. You can get a lot in in nine years.

This is very common, though, too. I got sober at 29,, like three months before I turned 30.. And it sounds like for you, 39, like there's something about approaching. You're like, okay, we're about to enter another decade.

It was 39, and it was also COVID. And the party was so long in the past. And then it was just me with a shovel.

And when you admit to yourself, like I'm also romantic and I'm telling a great story about myself and my life. And when you finally admit, there's nothing new gonna happen in this direction. I'm gonna repeat. I'm gonna wake up next to somebody. I'm gonna do this, but I've already done it.

Also the shiny, blissful first hour of doing whatever you're doing, even that blossom has fucking worn off. So really, the majority of the time is just the shame cycle of the next, however long.

Self-hatred.

There's a version of that that I think is akin to what we're talking about in terms of the validation aspect. Getting back to that emotional samurai I was talking about is using in that way. The day begins, you're like, fuck, hard day at work, but you know what? I'm gonna meet the guys at the 4100 and blah. Okay, so yeah.

And you learn to work. I went to UCLA and I was going through the groundlings. It became a part of how I knew how to do stuff. Of course. It's like, oh my God, Monday through Thursday, we've got a lot to make up for.

Bringing back my metaphor, which I'm really into right now. What's it like just to be in the ocean? And what's it like to just sit at five? And the amount of then presence? you get to all of it.

Did you read dopamine nation by chance? It sounds like you really have knowledge of that.

No, why?

Anna Lemke, great book, Stanford. It's everything you're talking about. The body will find homeostasis period. You can't outsmart it. So you can dump all this shit.

But guess what you got to return to.

And it's like a four to one investment. So if you've smoked a cigarette, it's great. for four minutes. You're going to feel like shit for 20 minutes. If you cold plunge for 10 minutes, guess what?

Well, that for me, during that COVID moment, I think it was the body shock. I don't have the discipline like you. So I'm not going to go to the gym or jump rope. I'm going to go burn myself in this fucking sauna.

Passively burn myself.

Fucking, get through it. And then, after an hour and a half of that, I'm like 5 PM has passed.

That's funny. That's my drug. currently is sauna. So we record in here. And if it's a very long day, I step out feeling like, well, I deserve a reward.

Every day for me.

Yeah. So then I go in there and I'm like angsty and itchy and I deserve something. And then, when I leave there, I'm like, okay, I'm out of everything. And this is tenable.

I'll do that or I'll have some sugar. At that COVID moment, it was like the drinker, Jenny's the drinker.

Okay. Well, that was a party. Let's talk really quick. And then we're going to talk about the movie. I promise you.

Because I was so nervous, dude.

You think?

Well, I don't think, I fucking know. You're talking about when I sang on the roof?

Yeah, I guess you did sing on the roof. But I thought you were brilliant.

I was terrified to learn the song in my trailer. And I was desperately trying to learn the song. And I had to perform in front of all of you. Yeah, I was nervous, out of my mind.

Life is a comedy, man. I'm never right on when anyone's going.

I mean, I'm just using this as an example. I'm not calling you out on this, but we do all think everything's about us. Of course. And nothing's about us, ever.

Even though I know that.

Because everything is about the other person. Yeah, it is.

Everyone's in their own head, dealing with their own stuff.

Talk about one of those things, though, you know intellectually. And then, when it's happening, you can't see it that way. There's no way. I'm considering that you are dealing with something. Other than evaluating me as a person.

Have we met other times?

No, it was just that it was wet hot. Then I bumped into you coming in or out of the bathroom just a few months ago. And then I think I brought up wet hot. But I probably caught you off guard.

I don't think you said anything about wet hot.

You don't think so? I think I did. I think we met on. Then I was like, man, he doesn't remember me. You know, I'm wet hot.

He's dying to get out of this bathroom.

This guy just, I'm not for him. That's fine. Not everyone loves Diet Coke. Oh.

Love it. You love it too? No. Oh.

That's the grossest thing on. Why would you have a Diet Coke when you can have a fucking Coke?

We need some friction.

I'm with you on that. I like Coke.

It's because it's what I grew up on. My mom only drank like Tab.

Oh, Tab. Yeah. Is this still around?

I wish. Once Coke got, the big boys got into the scene, they were like, let me show you how to do a sugar-free soda. Sorry, Tab.

This string cheese is so good.

Does anybody want some? I'm okay.

Thank you, though. I do like a string cheese.

So yeah, I tallied both of those experience up to like, this gentleman has zero interest in me. And I understand, I wouldn't have much interest in myself either. And then, when you rolled up today, I was like, well, I'm thinking I might be wrong.

I'll be honest with you. I maybe have some preconceptions and judgments about people that willingly offer themselves a lot to the world. I definitely think I have judged you before. What a jag off doing this. He's just talking about himself all the time.