Despite, at one point in time, it feeling as though the headlines surrounding Don’t Worry Darling would never end, today, the drama feels like nothing more than a fever dream. We made it out: now firmly in the Ariana DeBose’s BAFTAs rap and Hailey Bieber and Selena Gomez’s TikTok drama part of pop culture.
However, despite Florence Pugh very much being as over it as most of us, Chris Pine is here to transport us back to the manic time that was the film’s Venice Film Festival premiere. Specifically, what has become known on the internet as “Spitgate:” the moment that convinced the culture that Harry Styles quite literally spat on Pine.
Though Styles and Olivia Wilde, the film’s director, addressed the alleged incident themselves in the days following — Styles making a joke on stage one of his Love on Tour shows that he popped over to Venice for a hot minute to spit on Chris Pine, and Wilde denying it ever happened — until now, Pine relied on his publicist’s denial to clear up the confusion.
But in a new interview with Esquire, the man himself elaborated. “Harry did not spit on me,” Pine said in a video for the magazine’s new issue. “Harry’s a very, very kind guy.”
According to Pine, he wasn’t even aware of the internet’s theory — and the viral video — until he was flying out of Venice and his publicist told him they needed to give a response.
“I had no idea what happened,” he recalled. “She showed me the thing, and it does look, indeed, like Harry’s spitting on me. He didn’t spit on me.”
Pine did provide an explanation for what was actually going on in the moment, saying, “I think what he 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.'”
Pine is, of course referring to another viral moment from the premiere: Styles attempting to answer questions during the press junket while he looked like he’d fallen asleep in the next seat.
Now that that’s all cleared up, does anyone want to speak on what really happened between Pugh and Wilde? Because Pugh herself sure doesn’t.
