When Chris Pratt got high and challenged his co-star to a fight: “I think I could take you”
Prior to 2014, Chris Pratt was known primarily as a comedy actor, with his biggest role at the time as the man-child assistant Andy Dwyer in Parks and Recreation, alongside some romantic comedies and other intently funny flicks which failed to land.
What changed in 2014 is, as you probably know, it became the year that Pratt led an all-star cast in Marvel’s blockbuster roster, Guardians of the Galaxy, and quickly became a household name.
As Peter Quill, a child born on Earth but raised in space as the dashing Star-Lord, Pratt became the face of a brand new, insanely popular super-powered team. Nobody had heard of these characters prior to James Gunn’s take on them, but now they were global superstars with an incredibly bright future ahead of them. The actor has reprised this character several times since then and has been able to branch out into a number of other action-oriented roles, for better and for worse…mostly worse.
Unfortunately, his ascent to superherodom (if that’s a word) might have gone to his head, where, speaking on The Late Late Show With James Corden, Pratt shared a story about his Guardians co-star Dave Bautista. After a long day of shooting, Bautista caught up with Pratt and informed him that he had tried to contact him once they’d gone their separate ways.
“The next day, he goes, ‘Hey man, that text you sent last night’, and I go, ‘What text?’,” he responded, a little lost on the context. The future Dune star then went on to reveal what Pratt had sent him, much to the star’s horror: “Dave, I wanna wrestle you,” it apparently read, “I wanna wrestle you. No one needs to know, but I just want to know. I think I could take you. I think I could wrestle you, bro. Like, collegiate rules, no elbows, no knees. I just want to feel the power.”
Anyone who knows about Bautista’s pre-Hollywood career will know why this is a bad idea. Prior to tearing up the big screen, he was tearing up a WWE ring as ‘The Animal’ Batista. One of the most physically impressive, explosively powerful wrestlers in the history of the company, Bautista leveraged his size to great effect during his early career, long before he lost a significant amount of weight and muscle mass. Regardless, he was still a big dude at this point for you don’t get to play a character called ‘Drax the Destroyer’ by skipping the gym.
It should be noted that, when Pratt sent that text, he may not have been in the best state. “There was a moment in my life where I would take sleep aids to help me sleep,” he revealed, “I don’t anymore because of things like this.” He went on to claim that he was “mortified” when he realised what he had done, before concluding that, if they were to wrestle, Bautista would “kill me so fast”, and it’s hard to disagree with that astute assessment.
As much as it would have been to imagine Pratt taking a ‘Batista Bomb’ while off his nut on sleeping pills, it’s probably best for all involved that this fantasy match-up never made it to reality.
