If you’ve yet to check out “Smokin’ Aces,” the film follows disparate crews of hitmen and bondsmen out to lay claim to a lucrative bounty on the head of a washed-up magician turned mob informant. Chris Pine’s crusty killer Darwin Tremor enters the high-stakes fray with his equally demented brothers Jeeves (Kevin Durand) and Lester (Maury Sterling) in tow. If you’ve seen Pine at work in “Smokin’ Aces,” you know he more than flexed his acting chops in the film, playing the middle Tremor brother with an edgy mix of unhinged menace and introspective intellect, neither of which had been glimpsed in his rom-com days.

As it was, Pine was clearly aware of what it meant to his career for Joe Carnahan to cast him in “Smokin’ Aces,” telling Showbiz Junkies during a red carpet event for the film that getting roughed up to play Darwin Tremor was beyond liberating. “It was great to come in in the morning, be able to look like crap, to do what you do and to not have it [his work] be about that [his looks] is really nice … You’re allowed to just act, ya know?” Pine said. 

As Pine told Den of Geek, that’s exactly what he wanted when he started acting. “I just got to play what I always thought I’d be playing when I got involved in the business,” he said, continuing, “which is wacky, fun, creative characters instead of the more bland milquetoast version of a human being.” And that’s exactly what Chris Pine has been doing ever since.