Chris Pine hopes joy of playing Dungeons & Dragons with his co-stars translates to film adaptation

AUSTIN, Texas – Mention Dungeons & Dragons, the tabletop role-playing game, and visions of nerdy teenagers sitting around a table – pretending to be wizards, monks and druids and yelling at one another – come to mind.

But the cast and creators of the new movie adaptation Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves promise that viewers will not have to know anything about the old-school fantasy game – which first came out in the 1970s – to enjoy the film.

Opening in Singapore cinemas on Thursday, the fantasy heist comedy follows a band of adventurers on a quest to retrieve a lost relic. It stars Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Rege-Jean Page and Hugh Grant.

Speaking at the South By Southwest film festival in Austin, Texas, where the movie had its world premiere, Pine says the cast came to the project with varying levels of knowledge of Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D, which has players improvise as they assume different characters and go on fantasy quests together.

But after playing it with his co-stars and his family, the American actor finally understood the appeal of the cult game, which peaked in popularity in the United States in the 1980s but saw a resurgence during the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020.

“We all played together as a cast. That was fun; we got to know one another,” says Pine, the 42-year-old star of the Star Trek reboot films (2009 to present).

“It’s a pretty explosive way to get to know one another,” adds Page, the 34-year-old English actor who starred in the first season of period drama Bridgerton (2020 to present).

Before Pine started shooting, he had also tried playing the game with his family.

“I had no experience with it at all but it’s basically like acting. It’s improvisation and a game for actors, essentially,” Pine says.

“With my family, my nephew was the only person who knew how to play. But everybody, within five minutes, even if they didn’t know what they were doing, was having a blast.

“Because there’s no way not to have a blast and that’s hopefully the joy that you see transferred on screen,” he adds.

Pine plays Edgin, a bard who at the start of the film is locked behind bars with his barbarian friend Holga (Rodriguez). The two of them had led a merry band of thieves until a heist went badly wrong.

Rodriguez, 44, was more familiar with D&D.

“I played it when I was a kid, but I have a profound respect for it because, for me, it’s like a gym for the imagination,” says the American star of the Fast & Furious film franchise (2001 to present).

“And there’s no better way to work that imagination than playing Dungeons & Dragons. If you want to be a writer, role-playing games like D&D are the best way to go because you just work that muscle – you have to create everything from scratch.”

To adapt the game for the screen, American writer-directors Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley – the scribes behind superhero blockbuster Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) and comedy Horrible Bosses (2011) – had to conjure up a story using only the mythology of the game.

Daley, 37, says part of the challenge was overcoming preconceived notions about how it would turn out, especially given that previous screen adaptations, including the 2000 film Dungeons & Dragons, were critical and commercial flops.

But as long-time fans of the game, he and Goldstein felt they could capture its spirit while also taking a more light-hearted approach to the genre.

Says Goldstein, 54: “I think up till now, the fantasy genre has been considered something that has to be taken deadly seriously. It’s all kind of gloomy and there are people dying right and left and not a lot of laughs.

“But we knew that there’s another side to D&D. It’s embodied in the game, but we hadn’t seen it on screen yet, so that’s what we set out to do.”

At the same time, the film does not forget non-gamers, says Page, who plays Xenk, the knight who guides the group in its quest.

He adds: “There’s a deep respect for the lore and loads of Easter eggs and fun D&D rule jokes.

“But we also just have a movie that’s about friends and family and fantasy and finding yourself.”

 Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves opens in cinemas on Thursday.