“OKAY—CEDARWOOD,” CHRIS PINE SAYS. “Here we go. Rosemary.”
Monday morning in the hills above Hollywood. We’re in Pine’s sauna, a cube of wood and glass near the edge of his property. Pine—lightly bearded, shock of graying hair, wearing only orange board shorts—is perusing little bottles, dripping essential oils into a waist-high chimney topped with hissing hot stones, fine-tuning the vibe.
“Oh, yeah. Enoki leaf,” he says. “We’ll do that.”
Pine flicks the thermometer: 120 degrees and rising. He picks up a bundle of leafy twigs—to move the air around, he explains, not the kind you whip yourself with, though he’s got one of those, too. He moves the air around. Then he climbs onto the bench next to me and folds himself into an impressively deep yoga squat, ass down by his heels.
The air in my mouth feels like cotton candy. I reach for the insulated water bottle I’ve been provided. “If you taste something in that,” Pine says, “I put a bit of barley tea in there.” He tried it at a Korean restaurant; now he’s into barley tea. It’s become part of the overall sauna process. Pine enjoys a process. Making an espresso, building a fire. “I love any sort of ritual,” he says. “I can even get into a Catholic Mass because I like the aesthetic. And a sauna is a whole ritual. It’s about gifting yourself a period where there’s nothing to do other than to purify, to release, to cleanse, to start again.”
We’ll sweat and release and cleanse here for twenty minutes, until the heat becomes intolerable, then we’ll hit the unheated outdoor pool—just in and out, a quick car-battery shock to the central nervous system—and finish strong with a dip in the cold plunge, a barrel of what feels like near-freezing water built into the ground. This is how Pine, forty-two, does it every day, except we’re doing it in the morning, and he prefers to do it in the afternoon, sweating out the day’s physical and psychic accu- mulations. Being out in the world makes him “kind of emotionally and physically tired, so I need some sleep and some sauna time, and reading, and just puttering about in the garden.”
When he’s alone in the sauna, Pine will stretch or listen to a podcast, but because I’m here, we talk about his last big moment out in the world: the seemingly quite nutso press tour, consumed soap-operatically by a diversion-craving populace when the film premiered in Venice last September. “If there was drama, there was drama,” Pine says of the shoot, but for the record, “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.” He speaks—“to fucking death,” and maintains that nobody spat on anybody in Venice.
