BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Chris Pine has some big shoes to fill as he becomes the fourth actor to play Tom Clancy hero Jack Ryan.

“With Captain Kirk,” Pine, 33, said last week at the Montage Hotel of the “Star Trek” reboot, “Shatner made such a great impression in the zeitgeist it was a whole different thing.”

In Friday’s “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” Pine noted that while playing the CIA analyst-turned-freedom fighter “you are present enough but let the story shine — and we had a great story.”

Although an origins story, “Shadow Recruit” begins with the 9/11 terrorist attacks and concludes in 2014 as Ryan journeys from Marine in the Mideast to covert CIA operator in Moscow, where he must foil a plot by Kenneth Branagh’s wily oligarch.

“It’s a different kind of face-off where a tiny event can affect a larger event elsewhere,” said Branagh, who also directs.

Pine grew up watching the Jack Ryan movies that starred first Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and then Ben Affleck and took notes before making this one.

“I’ve always loved the series and the spy genre. As I re-watched the films what was interesting was how they were portrayed,” he said.

“What Alec does is this confident analytical man who knows what he knows and is not afraid to say it. Harrison, with his tweeds and his Volkswagen Rabbit, is the humble intellect and the classic reluctant hero. Somewhere in that was a great way to begin looking at the character.

“Ryan’s not Jason Bourne with kung fu tricks or James Bond with his hot women and cool cars. His virtues lay in a different ballpark and are much simpler.

“What makes him so great is he’s so archaic; he’s a man of his word. If he makes a promise he’s going to keep it.”

Pine rejected any kind of flash in favor of “a Men’s Wearhouse look. He doesn’t care about suits or fancy watches. He has a 10-dollar haircut and that guy, especially on Wall Street, makes him the odd man out.

“You can pass him on the street and not look back, but he so happens to be the man who’s saving the world.”

(“Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit” opens Friday.)