It was Venice Film Festival, there were glamorous celebrities all around, and Don’t Worry Darling had just premiered amid layers and layers of DRAMA. But then 'spit-gate' emerged above it all.
To refresh your memory, a clip of Harry Styles and Chris Pine from the festival in September last year went viral, where it looks like Harry spits in Chris’ lap as he sits down for the premiere – yes, really. We analysed the clip again and again, breaking down the action.
But now, all these months later, Chris is finally clearing the air about the infamous moment and some of the drama surrounding Don’t Worry Darling.
In an interview with Esquire, the actor recalled being woken up by his publicist mid-flight about the viral video.
“She wakes me up, in a, you know, in a state,” he said. “She says, ‘We have to craft a message about what happened in Venice.’ And I'm like ‘About what?’ ‘About Harry spitting on you.’ Which I have no idea what happened. She showed me the thing. It does look, indeed, like Harry spitting on me.”
Then, to settle the debate once and for all, Chris confirmed: “He didn't spit on me.”
He said he thinks the clip actually captures an inside joke he shared with Harry.
“I think he said, ‘It's just words, isn't it?’ Because we had this little joke, because we're all jetlagged, we're all trying to answer these questions, and sometimes when you're doing these press things, your brain goes all befuddled, you know, you start speaking gibberish, and we had a joke like, ‘It's just words, man.’”
So there you go! It's not even the first time the speculation has been addressed by the film's stars. Back in August, when he returned to his world tour, Harry made a joke on stage in New York. “I just popped very quickly to Venice to spit on Chris Pine… but fear not, we’re back,” he laughed to the audience.
In his interview with Esquire, Chris also briefly discussed the alleged in-fighting that took place during and after the filming of Don’t Worry Darling. If you can recall, that involved his co-star Florence Pugh and director Olivia Wilde.
He said: “If there was drama, there was drama. 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.”
And there we have it – one of 2022's weirdest celeb dramas has a line drawn under it.
