CHRIS PRATT AND THE POWER OF BROTHERHOOD
A-lister’s latest tugs at the heartstrings
Chris Pratt’s new movie is all about brotherly love. It’s a subject he knows well, since he and his older brother, Cully, were close, growing up in Lake Stevens, Washington.
“I always wore his clothes, the day after he wore them,” Pratt recalled. “I’d pick my brother’s dirty stuff up off the ground and put it right on. He always knew how to match his clothes, plus he had this nice-smelling cologne. It was a win-win.”
At the time he wasn’t the star of such movies as Guardians Of The Galaxy
(2014) and Jurassic World (2015), which together raked in more than US$2 billion worldwide. He was a chunky freshman and, by his own admission, “a dork”. His three-years-older brother — who wanted to become an actor, but is a cop — was a cool senior in high school.
“Finally,” he said, “one day my brother sat me down and gently said, ‘Hey, man, I think people are noticing. You should stop doing the clothing thing. You need to be yourself and be comfortable with who you are.’”
It was a good life lesson, one of many Pratt got from his brother.
“I can’t think of anything I know that my brother didn’t teach me,” said Pratt, clad in a light-brown shirt, black jeans and black boots for an interview at a Beverly Hills hotel on a warm February afternoon.
Brotherly love was in the air because of Pratt’s new film, Onward, opening in Thailand tomorrow. Directed by Dan Scanlon, the animated film is set in a fantasy world of elves and unicorns, and centres on shy, easily intimidated Ian Lightfoot (voice of Tom Holland) and his rowdy older brother Barley (voice of Pratt).
The brothers find a magical staff that can bring back their deceased father for a single day, giving Barley a chance to say goodbye to his beloved dad and Ian the chance to meet the father he never knew. However, they screw up the spell and bring back only their father’s legs and feet. They have only a day to find a special stone that will reignite the magic staff before their window of opportunity slams shut.
“I didn’t have to think twice about this movie,” Pratt said, “because it celebrates the love between two brothers.
Brothers are a special relationship that you don’t always get to see in films. It’s why grown men who have seen early screenings of Onward have come up to me to say, ‘Uh, man, I just want you to know that I cried.’”
“What I loved about this movie is that Barley was never jealous of the fact that he didn’t have the gift of magic within him,” the 40-year-old actor continued. “His brother had it, and that was fine with him.”
“I was the Ian and my brother was the Barley,” he said, returning to his youth. “It was my brother who always wanted to be an actor, and he did all the plays when we were in high school. In fact, the first time I ever saw my mom cry was when he was Boo Bear in a Christmas play. It made me think, ‘Wow, that’s amazing. I want to be an actor.’”
“Cully went into the army, I became the actor,” Pratt concluded. “In my life my brother is so proud of me. Same with the movie. Barley loves his younger brother so much, he’s so proud of him. It really made me appreciate even more how my brother is with me. He’s super-encouraging and positive about my acting.”
Pratt and Holland — who in their day jobs play Marvel Comics’ most famous Peters, Peter “Star-Lord” Quill and Peter “Spider-Man” Parker — got to know one another during several years of work on Onward.
“There were times when we were together in the sound booth, there were times when the director separated us,” Pratt recalled with a chuckle.
“I loved the moments when I was with Tom. It was a way to get a model of what our relationship would be like on-screen. It was important that we interacted with each other and just goofed around.”
“Of course,” he added with a laugh, “that was not the most conducive thing to creating clean audio tracks!”
By and large, they stuck to the script. “When I did The Lego Movie (2014), it was a lot of riffing,” Pratt said. “There is a certain magic found in the moment that doesn’t always exist on the page. But there was not a lot of riffing in Onward. What was on the page was so magical that, for the most part, everything we said was in the script.”
He and Holland had immediate chemistry, he added.
“You throw some chemicals together and there is a heat or an explosion,” Pratt said. “You can’t predict it. You can just hope for it. Tom and I just found that magic. We really were like two brothers.”
The future actor spent his early years in Minnesota, where his father was a taconite miner. The family then moved to Alaska, so his father could work in a gold mine. “The family would decide, pick up and move,” Pratt recalled.
They finally settled in Lake Stevens, outside of Seattle. Pratt wrestled and played football, becoming captain of his high-school football team and one of the state’s top wrestlers.
Meanwhile, though, his big brother was doing plays.
“I’d watch my brother kill it on stage,” Pratt recalled. “That’s when I said, ‘This is what I want to do with my life.’”
Sadly, his father was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and became unable to work — he died in 2014 — and times got tough. Pratt’s mother worked at the local Safeway, but the family lost its home and moved to a rental house and then a trailer. Cully went into the army and his kid brother ended up living with a friend, waiting tables and taking classes at the local community college.
It was there that a theatre teacher told him: “You should think about acting professionally.”
After brief stints in sales and working at Bubba Gump Shrimp in Hawaii, he took her words to heart and began auditioning. He also started living on the beach and then in a van. In leaner times he crashed on friends’ couches and in a tent.
One day, however, actress Rae Dawn Chong stopped by Bubba Gump for a bite, fell into conversation with Pratt and took his telephone number. Later she called him about a role in a comedy short, Cursed Part 3 (2000), that she was directing.
“The only problem was, I couldn’t afford a plane ticket to LA,” Pratt recalled. “I had about $60 to my name. Rae said, ‘Sweetie, we’ll fly you there.’”
The short was little-seen, but it was enough to get Pratt a manager and a new life in Los Angeles, where he waited tables until he landed a role on Ever
wood (2002-2006), which was followed by The O.C. (2006-2007) and then the hit Parks And Recreation (2009-2015), on which he played Andy Dwyer.
Meanwhile he was establishing himself on the big screen with Bride
Wars (2009), Take Me Home Tonight
(2011), Moneyball (2011), The Five-Year Engagement (2012), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Her (2013) and The Lego Movie. Guardians Of The Galaxy and Jurassic World made him an A-list star, and since then he’s been seen in The Magnificent
Seven (2016), Guardians Of The Galaxy
Vol.2 (2017), Jurassic World: Fallen
Kingdom (2018), Avengers: Infinity War
(2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019).
Next up for Pratt is Jurassic World 3, in which he will reprise his role as dinosaur expert Owen Grady.
“I’m in training now,” he said. “I’m watching my food. If I eat a Skittle at this age, I gain 10 pounds.”
Pratt was married to actress Anna Faris from 2009 to 2018, and shares custody of their seven-year-old son, Jack. Last summer he married author Katherine Schwarzenegger, daughter of actor/ politician Arnold Schwarzenegger and television journalist Maria Shriver. They live in Los Angeles and also have a farm on the San Juan Islands, off the coast of Washington State, where they raise sheep, pigs and chickens.
“It’s my own special slice of heaven,” Pratt said.
Not that he has any urge to hole up there.
“With a good car you can see this entire beautiful country,” the actor said. “It was designed to be driven across. Don’t sleep on getting behind the wheel and exploring this country. I like nothing better than a road trip across this big, wide frontier. You can get anywhere with enough gas money.”
If he had a little Onward magic of his own, he’d even bring a passenger along.
“I wish I could bring back my dad, who passed away just before Guardians came out,” Pratt said. “If I could bring him back for just one day, I’d probably show him Guardians and hope that he liked it. Then we would go for a drive or out to the farm.
“That would be a good day.”
I can’t think of anything I know that my brother didn’t teach me