The Rundown: The Harry Styles Vs. Chris Pine Spit Fiasco Was Fun As Hell

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

Okay, we are all aware of the spitting, yes The thing where Harry Styles is alleged to have spit on his co-star Chris Pine during a press event for the massively chaotic upcoming film Don’t Worry Darling, which has been riddled with reports of on-set romances and feuds between its female star (Florence Pugh) and its director (Olivia Wilde), to the degree that every film journalist in Venice is doing high-level body language analysis at every red carpet event to see if they can uncover any additional drama I hope you are. It’s been just a parade of anarchy for a few weeks now. Nick Kroll is there, too, because he’s also in the movie, which is really funny to me for some reason. Anyway. Chaos.

I won’t post the video of the alleged spitting because it is getting nuked offline with copyright claims as fast as people can put it up, but three things are worth noting here:

All of it, too. There are not enough massive entertainment stories about famous pop stars spitting on their co-stars on the press tour for indie movies. I have always said this. I will always say this. The whole thing is like the film festival version of the thing where The Rock and Vin Diesel feuded on the set of the Fast & Furious movies so much that The Rock went on Instagram and posted a whole messy message about his “male co-stars” being candy asses. Remember how much fun that was I do. I will never forget it. It’s up there with “a teen supervillain rappelled into a showroom and stole Guy Fieri’s Lamborghini” on the list of All-Time Brian Stories.

This one isn’t there yet and will probably never get there, although I do reserve the right to alter this position if we get THE MYSTERIOUS SECOND CAMERA ANGLE.

New evidence is now being rumored — in the form of a “mystery woman” who was sitting behind both actors and may have caught the entire exchange on her phone. Now, fans are taking to social media to demand the unknown woman come forward with her “conclusive” footage. According to photos taken at the event, the woman — who is seated two rows behind the “Watermelon Sugar” singer and Pine — was the closest person to the altercation except Wilde, who was looking the other way at the time.

I mean, yeah. We’ve just got everything here. Scandal, superstars, spit, mysterious women with potentially explosive video evidence, all of it. And that’s before we get to my favorite part of it all, which is the thing where publicists and extremely famous people had to wade out into public and issue strongly worded denials about people spitting on each other. Here is Chris Pine’s representative giving a statement to Variety that I like to imagine was tapped out furiously on an iPhone.

“This is a ridiculous story — a complete fabrication and the result of an odd online illusion that is clearly deceiving and allows for foolish speculation,” Pine’s rep said in a statement to Variety. “Just to be clear, Harry Styles did not spit on Chris Pine. There is nothing but respect between these two men and any suggestion otherwise is a blatant attempt to create drama that simply does not exist.”

And here’s Harry Styles himself addressing it at his sold-out concert at Madison Square Garden, which is another nice reminder that the alleged spitter in this scenario, in addition to being the star of a little film festival movie, is also one of the most famous people in the entire world.

“This is our tenth show at Madison Square Garden. It’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful to be back in New York. I just popped very quickly to Venice to spit on Chris Pine,” Styles says jokingly in video footage captured by fans. “But fret not, we’re back!”

It’s great. I love it. I love every part of it. And the beautiful thing about it all is that it doesn’t even really matter if the spitting was real at this point. If it was, great, then Harry Styles and Chris Pine hated each other so much while making this movie that their disdain spilled over into the press tour with spaced-out stares and actual loogies, which is so messy and funny that it should be documented by historians and in museums.

Or, it’s not real, and these poor dudes have had to spend an entire week answering questions about a spit-related incident that never happened. And Nick Kroll was there. Like, the whole time. I don’t think we can possibly overstate that last part. I like to picture him doing the Coach Steve voice from Big Mouth to try to settle things down on the set.

You can never take this away from me.

This is the first teaser trailer for the second Knives Out movie, which comes out December 23 and is called Glass Onion. There’s not much there by way of substance, I guess, which makes enough sense given the thing where the movie doesn’t come out for over two months and they’re not going to come right out and tell us today who committed the murder and why they did it. That would be kind of funny, though. If they just full-on spoiled the whole Christmas event movie in a 90-second YouTube video they dropped on an 82-degree day in September. I would respect it, if only for the needless chaos of the whole thing. Something to consider for the next one, which I still want to feature Daniel Craig and then just a lot of Muppets.

Anyway, my point here is that the trailer gives us our first look at the cast in action, and one member of that cast is Kathryn Hahn, and Kathryn Hahn is going to absolutely dominate in this sucker. To be clear, I’m not saying her character is going to be a dominating figure. That could be the case. Very few people on earth know that for sure so far. What I mean is that Kathryn Hahn and the sensibilities of the Knives Out universe are a perfect match and I would bet all of my own money and most of yours that she is going to be awesome in this.

That should not be a controversial statement, either. Kathryn Hahn rules in almost everything and has for a while. The rest of the cast is great, too. Dave Bautista is playing an influencer named Duke Cody who packs a firearm in his Speedo and appears to be having a blast. That’s great. But Kathryn Hahn — if she wants to, which she might not because she is a team player — will absolutely eat his lunch in front of him. I’m excited. I was excited already. Now I’m, like, double excited.

The only downside in all of this is that it took them all the way until the second movie to get her into the series. I mean, what are we doing here That’s some Day One business right there. But we are remedying that now, at least. Better late than never.