The director who told Chris Pratt to shut the fuck up: “Do what the fuck I tell you”
It’s been so long now since Chris Pratt had his glow up for the ages and turned into an all-action butt-kicking movie hero that it barely registers he was once the unkempt and slightly doughy (albeit very funny) amateur rock musician Andy Dwyer in Parks and Recreation.
But a bit like that other Office-to-action star, John Krasinski, Pratt is now a franchise-leading, muscle-bound hunter of dinosaurs and traverser of galaxies, and a walking, talking advert for going to the gym instead of eating petrol station pasties like the rest of us. In fact, he’s one of the highest-grossing actors in movie history, and despite the performance (and reviews) of his latest film, that’s not likely to change any time soon.
You might have thought that pairing Pratt with Mission Impossible’s Rebecca Ferguson and hanging a film around the very now topic of AI would be a bit of an open net, but Mercy, the film that came and went the last couple of weeks without any fanfare whatsoever and struggled to break even, just didn’t land with critics or audiences, and currently has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 22%, which is… not great.
Unfortunately for Pratt it comes hot on the heels of his leading one of the biggest flops in recent memory, which was Netflix’s The Electric State, another sci-fi effort that despite being directed by Avengers Endgame’s Russo Brothers and featuring Stranger Things’ Millie Bobby Brown was absolutely panned by all and sundry, with a budget of £320million resulting in reviews that variously described it as ‘lumbering’ and ‘a disaster’.
Both those movies are a far cry from what might at this rate end up being seen as Pratt’s glory years with the Marvel Guardians of the Galaxy movies directed by James Gunn. Pratt’s leading role as Star-Lord saw him swaggering around the universe in iconic style, a Walkman packed full of good tunes and a blaster in hand, along with a motley crew of assembled raccoons and monosyllabic trees.
But Pratt certainly didn’t have an easy time making the trilogy, once telling GQ that the director Gunn pulled no punches when it came to getting the performances he wanted out of his main actor. Gunn, in fact, was simply trying to get Pratt out of his own head and to stop overthinking things.
Pratt said, “I thought I was bad. I thought I was doing bad acting. I would just think: My bullshit meter’s going off. This screams inauthentic to me.”
According to Pratt, however, Gunn had little patience with it, saying: “He’s like, ’Who gives a shit what you think? I don’t fucking care!’” He’d be, ’It’s not your fucking movie, dude, it’s mine! Trust me and shut the fuck up and do what the fuck I tell you, and scream it!’”
Fortunately, Pratt wasn’t one to take shouted, sweary criticism to heart and followed Gunn’s direction and encouragement well enough that the three films were colossal hits for Marvel, each of them bringing in just shy of a billion dollars at the box office. And the actor bore no grudges against Gunn, backing him when he was briefly fired by Disney.
Pratt is now about to add another few hundred million to his movie gross as he reprises his voicing of Mario in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which hits cinemas on April 1st. He’s also finished filming on an upcoming action thriller called Way of the Warrior Kid, directed by McG.
