Chris Pine admits 'it does look' like Harry Styles spit on him — but this is what actually happened

Chris Pine has spoken! Although the chaos of the Don't Worry Darling press tour is so last year, it's worth going back in time to September as the actor is directly speaking about Harry Styles and "spitgate" for the first time.

Pine previously denied through his representative that Styles spat on him at the film's premiere at the Venice Film Festival, and he maintains that none of the Grammy winner's saliva landed on him — but he agreed the viral video appeared pretty damning.

"It does look, indeed, like Harry spitting on me. He didn't spit on me," Pine declared to Esquire. For what it's worth, he called Styles "a very very kind guy."

Pine had no idea at the time that Twitter was convinced Styles spat on him inside the theater.

"I was on the plane with my publicist, who says I look like Rachel from Friends [with my current hairstyle], we're flying back from Venice. And I'm sleeping, having a great time on the plane. I love planes," he explained. "And she wakes me up, in a, you know, in a state. 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."

In reality, the Star Trek star said that Styles leaned down to tell him an inside joke.

"I think what he said, is he leaned down, and 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,'" he recalled.

As for whether Olivia Wilde's Don't Worry Darling really was as dramatic as press reports made it seem, Pine harbors no bad feelings on his end.

"If there was drama, there was drama," Pine said of the shoot. "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."

It wasn't just Spitgate that had people eating up the film's press tour. Pine became an instant meme as he appeared totally checked out during an event in Venice.

"All the memes I saw about my face in Venice made me f***ing laugh," he admitted, specifically calling out the one captioned "me on an important zoom call watching my cat throw up on the sofa."

Pine said he really was just looking up at the ceiling in a jet lagged trance. "Sometimes the question's not that interesting," he shared, "and you just f***ing zone out, and you're looking at a ceiling because it's really pretty."