By one calculation, Chris Pratt ranks at number five in the highest-grossing movie stars of all time. A regular in the Marvel and Jurassic World universes, he has appeared in films that have taken more than €12 billion at the box office. He has members of the Kennedy and Schwarzenegger dynasties as in-laws.
One could hardly imagine stronger qualifications to make it on to the A-list. Yet the actor has somehow managed to project an air of casual normality. Pratt still seems like the sort of fellow who opens his own beer cans.
“I think we’re pretty boring,” he says. “We’re pretty normal, boring folks. I have four kids. It’s a lot of just the mundane, normal day-to-day stuff. I think that’s really special. It’s really important to stay tethered. There’s this temptation to just cut the tether and fly off into space. I’ve seen enough actors who do that. And they just never come back. Right? And that worries me.”
He will get back to that abnormal normality, but, to open, we have to address the sociopolitical undercurrents of his latest movie. Timur Bekmambetov’s Mercy is a strange beast. Pratt plays a Los Angeles cop standing high-tech trial for the murder of his wife in a near-future dystopia. Summary justice is dispensed by an AI programme in the form of a virtual Rebecca Ferguson. No human lawyers are involved. Capital punishment is instant.
Okay, then. Something is surely being said here about the erosion of civil liberties in the United States. Are these issues that concern him?
“Yeah, I think so,” he says. “Mercy is not a think piece about AI or about totalitarianism or anything like that. It’s a fictional sci-fi thriller. And it’s escapism. It’s entertainment first and foremost. But, yeah, there are themes in there that, when considered, are likely to induce a bit of anxiety around the surveillance state and the implementation of potentially dangerous policy while we’re building these incredibly powerful tools of AI. Our digital life is recorded. We etch all of our moves into digital stone.”
Married to Katherine Schwarzenegger, daughter of Maria Shriver and you-know-who, since 2019, Pratt has been cautious about expressing any political leanings.
[ Chris Pratt: ‘Jurassic Park was part of my childhood. I don’t want to just pimp it out.’Opens in new window ]
“I’m trying to make sense of the election through the eyes of Americans on both sides,” he said, to some liberal huffing, after the US presidential election of 2024.
Such prudence may well be wise. Shriver is the niece of the Democratic Party deity John F Kennedy. Pratt’s father-in-law, the world’s most famous Arnold, was the Republican governor of California. So did this guy from a peripatetic working-class background find induction into these two mighty dynasties daunting?
“It’s such a blessing,” he says. “I was literally having a conversation with Arnold the day before yesterday. I brought the girls over there to do painting with him. I have a handful of issues in my life. And it’s always nice to talk to people about what’s going on.
“Some of those issues I can’t really discuss with people I grew up with, or my close family members. Because they just don’t have a frame of reference to understand where I’m coming from. But I can ask Arnold these questions, because he’s been through it – at a much higher level.”
Pratt’s spouse has also much to impart about life in the media fishbowl. Eunice Kennedy, her grandmother, was a philanthropist of note and founder of the Special Olympics. Sargent Shriver, her grandad, was a busy diplomat and, in 1972, a vice-presidential nominee.
“Katherine, my wife, grew up [the] daughter of a very well-known actor,” Pratt says. “And she was taught by her mother, who’s a true saint, the tools to try to stay grounded and stay normal amidst all of that.
“They raised four children that are all really great, normal kids. So she has the playbook. I thought it’s really awesome that we partnered up and are building this family. Because she’s got all the experience you need.”
Pratt’s own passage to this place is, in its own way, just as remarkable. Maybe more so. He had no influential relatives. There is not the hint of nepo baby about his ascent. There was no cunning scheme to conquer the world.
When I got on Parks and Rec I noticed one year, ‘Dang, I’m getting fat!’ In that episode I was the funniest I’ve ever been. I felt really like I wanted to keep in this avenue
“Life happened to me,” he agrees. “I didn’t have a plan to become an actor. I just happened to meet an actress who was a director while I was waiting tables, and she offered me an audition.
“I had done auditions before. I dreamed about being an actor the way a kid might dream of being an astronaut or a knight. ‘Yeah, that’d be great! That’s never going to happen, but it would be awesome.’ I felt I had the tools to do it. If the door were ever cracked open, I knew I could barrel through it.”
Pratt was born in Minnesota 46 years ago. Mom then worked at the local supermarket. Dad moved between jobs. Like many ordinary American families, the Pratts shifted about the US in search of work. He spent some of his earliest years way up north in Alaska. Home eventually turned out to be the suburbs of Seattle, in Washington State.
After graduation from high school, Pratt spent a spell at community college before embarking on a period of agreeable drift. The legend goes that Rae Dawn Chong, actor and then nascent director, spotted him working in a shrimp place on the Hawaiian island of Maui. The young waiter’s charisma was such that she suggested he audition for her debut horror film. It went well.
“She said, ‘You’re actually good. I think we’re going to use you,’” Pratt says. “I was, like, ‘Do we shoot it here in Maui?’ And she said, ‘No, we shoot it in LA.’ I said, ‘I can’t afford it in LA. I have about $60, and I don’t get paid for another week.’ She was, like, ‘Sweetheart, we will fly you.’ Ha ha!”
Pratt describes his subsequent rise as a series of “tiny, incremental steps forward and up”. He had a regular role on the TV show Everwood. You can see him in films such as Wanted and Jennifer’s Body. Looking back, you could view his arrival on Parks and Recreation, the warm-hearted NBC sitcom, as a big breakthrough, but that was not how it seemed at the time.
“Parks and Rec didn’t really become a phenomenon until after we’d already wrapped, through its emergence on Netflix and through streaming. So it felt like, every season, we were expecting to be cancelled. The show was getting some critical acclaim but not much at first. It wasn’t getting good numbers. We were just on the bubble every year. Then we would get the renewal.”
His role as the amiable Andy Dwyer won fans, but few would have guessed they were looking at a future action hero. The key Pratt persona – a good-hearted bumbler – seemed honed for light comedy. Mind you, his performance as Peter Quill, the Star-Lord, in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy films, is much taken up with ironic, barbed quips. The films are often straight-up comedies. He also had a bit of that in the astronomically successful Jurassic World movies.
“When I got on Parks and Rec I noticed one year, ‘Dang, I’m getting fat!’” he says, laughing. “In that episode I was the funniest I’ve ever been. I felt really like I wanted to keep in this avenue. Then I got extra-fat and started doing this sort of sweaty-sidekick comedic roles. Which was great. It was bread and butter. I was making money doing television. And I thought, ‘Maybe I’m not cut out to be that leading-man guy. Maybe I’m supposed to do these kind of supporting comedic characters.’ And so it was always my intention to do comedy.”
Now trim and honed, he can afford to joke about his earlier roundness. Pratt seems in control of his destiny. He has three children with Katherine Schwarzenegger and one with his former wife, Anna Faris.
In a position where he can now pick and choose, he is attempting to “steer back towards doing comedy”. He works for charity. He goes to church. Yes, there does still seem to be a degree of American normal in his life.
“I think I remain an outsider,” Pratt says. “The best way to remain an outsider in Hollywood is to stay normal. Then you’ve got an advantage.”
Mercy is in cinemas from Friday, January 23rd
