Although Chris Pine hasn’t appeared in any of Quentin Tarantino’s movies, the actor shares a special connection to the filmmaker. Along with enjoying Pine’s work, Tarantino is a big fan of the actor’s grandmother, House of Frankenstein actress Anne Gwynne; so much so that he included a clip of her Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Tarantino hasn’t been shy about heaping praise onto Pine and his family, and recently the man who plays James T. Kirk in the Star Trek franchise’s Kelvin timeline addressed those nice comments and his family’s connection to Tarantino’s 2019 movie.
Back in January 2020, Quentin Tarantino visited The Ringer to talk about how much he liked director Tony Scott’s final movie, 2010’s Unstoppable, which starred Chris Pine and Denzel Washington as a train conductor and railroad engineer, respectively, trying to stop the runaway train they were aboard. During that conversation, Tarantino called himself Pine’s biggest fan, and here’s what Pine had to say about that when THR asked if the director’s support “has been as surreal as one might expect”:
Of course, I’m extremely flattered. Just on a personal level, I used to take my mom [Gwynne Gilford] to the Academy Awards, and we’d always go to the Vanity Fair party, where we’d run into Quentin. And every time we ran into Quentin, he was so lovely with my mother and spoke with her about her mom [Anne Gwynne], who was an actress. And he, of course, knew everything about my grandmother. And then in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, he had one of my grandmother’s B movies [1958’s Teenage Monster] on the television screen that [the Manson family is watching] in Bruce Dern’s scene. So he’s a gem, man. I’m very, very grateful and kind of blown away that he thinks so highly of me. It feels nice.
Along with his grandmother having appeared in a variety of movies in the late 1930s and 1940s, both of Chris Pine’s parents, Robert Pine and Gwynne Gilford, are actors, with the former having starred on CHiPs as Sergeant Joseph Getraer, and the latter popping up in projects like The Waverly Wonders and Fade to Black. While Gwynne Gilford eventually retired from the acting life, between her own experiences and knowing about her mother’s time in the limelight, she had more than enough to talk about with Quentin Tarantino when they met up at Oscars-related events. In August 2020, Chris Pine recalled a time when she and the filmmaker conversed for about 40 minutes.
As for Anne Gwynne’s inclusion in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (which CinemaBlend’s own Sean O’Connell rated 4.5 out of 5 stars in his review), a clip of the late actress in Teenage Monster plays during the scene when Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth visits Bruce Dern’s George Spahn at the latter’s ranch, which has been populated by Manson Family members. Chris Pine said his mother was “ecstatic, just over the moon” when she saw this, and Pine himself described what Quentin Tarantino as “sweet.” Since Tarantino plans to make only one more movie before retiring from that aspect of his professional life, maybe he’ll consider casting Pine in that feature so the two of them can finally work together.
Until then, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood can be streamed with the Live TV portion of a Hulu subscription. Chris Pine can next be seen starring in The Contractor, and while he’s primed to play James Kirk again, he hasn’t seen a Star Trek 4 script yet. Get the lay of this year’s cinematic land with the 2022 movie releases guide.
