Chris Pratt’s inauspicious introduction to Hollywood: “It was the worst movie I’d ever seen”
I swear that the heads of every major studio in Hollywood have a big button behind their desk with the words ‘Chris Pratt’ written on it.
This man is in everything, and if you need a handsome white guy to play a sarcastic hero, he’s your man, and he’ll do it for the low, low price of several million dollars, and to give him some credit, he’s worked very hard to get to where he is now, but things weren’t always so simple for the Guardian of the Galaxy.
Pratt got his big break while working as a waiter at a ranch of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company in Hawaii, where he was serving the actor and director Rae Dawn Chong, who was taken aback by his charm, and in a scene straight from an old movie, Chong asked Pratt to be a part of her upcoming short film, an opportunity the future megastar snapped up without a second thought.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Pratt cast his mind back to those salad days, and he was so inexperienced with how the Hollywood system worked that he thought he’d miss out on this opportunity because he couldn’t afford a plane ticket, about which he revealed, “I had 60 bucks… and she was like, ‘Sweetie, we’ll fly you there,’” but unfortunately, when he did eventually get to Tinseltown, things weren’t quite as glamorous as he’d hoped.
“It was the worst movie I’d ever seen,” he said of the project, which was called Cursed Part 3. If you’re wondering what happened in parts one and two, then don’t bother, because they don’t exist.
The movie revolves around a crew making a film about ghosts who – in a twist nobody saw coming – end up being haunted by ghosts themselves. I don’t want to accuse Rae of having been on something when she came up with the idea, but given that her father is Tommy Chong of Cheech and Chong fame, we can’t rule it out.
Arnie’s future son-in-law might have been a little disappointed with the quality of his first film, but that wasn’t the point. “The whole reason that movie came along was just so I could be brought to Hollywood,” he continued. “It was like I had a premonition. I always wanted to go to Hollywood. I just didn’t know I was going to get there.”
Even when he finally got boots on the ground, it still took Pratt a long time to establish himself as a major player, and while Cursed Part Three came out in 2000, it wouldn’t be until 2009 that he took on the role of Andy Dwyer in Parks & Recreation, the character that would make him a household name. In that time, he kept plugging away, auditioning for (and missing out on) major movies until his number finally came up.
The phrase ‘you have to start somewhere’ might seem worn out, but it’s a cliché for a reason. Cursed Part 3 was never going to win any awards – even the Razzies wouldn’t have paid it any attention – but it was the first domino to fall in a truly monumental career.
