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Google Play“Spit-gate” has spilled over into 2023.
The online debate goes back to September, when the cast of Don’t Worry Darling attended a Venice Film Festival screening. Video showed Chris Pine sitting as his co-star Harry Styles took a seat next to him. As the latter bent down to his marked seat, he appeared to slightly purse his lips in Pine’s direction. Pine abruptly stopped clapping and looked down at his lap, leading many to believe that Styles had spit on his co-star.
Nearly six months after the viral incident, Pine spoke out in defense of Styles and insisted the footage was misleading.
“Harry did not spit on me. Harry is a very, very kind guy,” the actor said in the above video for Esquire.
Pine said he didn’t learn about the drama until he was on a flight from Italy.
“[My publicist] wakes me up in a state, and she says, ‘We have to craft a message on what happened in Venice,’” he recalled. “I’m like, ‘What?’ She says, ‘About Harry spitting on you.’ I had no idea what happened. She showed me the thing and it did look, indeed, like Harry spit on me. He didn’t spit on me.”
He continued, “I think what [Harry] said is—he leaned down and I think he said, ‘It’s just words isn’t it?’ ’Cause we had this little joke. ’Cause we’re all jet-lagged, we’re all trying to answer these questions that, sometimes, when you’re doing these press things, your brain goes all befuddled and you start speaking gibberish. And we had a joke, ‘It’s just words, man.’”
Spit-gate was just one of many controversies involving Don’t Worry Darling, a psychological thriller co-starring Florence Pugh, Gemma Chan, and director Olivia Wilde. Sources claimed Wilde was involved in a messy love triangle with Styles and her ex-fiancé Jason Sudeikis. There were also reported feuds between Styles and Pine as well as Wilde and Pugh. Several insiders said the beef stemmed from the aforementioned romances and alleged pay disparities.
“If there was drama, there was drama,” Pine told Esquire about the production. “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.”
The Star Trek alum also acknowledged the memes that were born from his blank stare at a Don’t Worry Darling press conference.
“All the memes I saw about my face in Venice made me fucking laugh,” he said, specifically shouting out the following:
Explaining the photos where he was staring up, he revealed, “It should be known 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. … Sometimes the question’s not that interesting, and you just fucking zone out, and you’re looking at a ceiling because it’s really pretty.”
