I've seen Chris Pratt in quite a few things, and I had a definite picture in my head of how he was going to be. Needless to say, Chris Pratt did not disappoint. He was the funny, silly goofball that I thought he would be. He is definitely somebody you could go out to dinner with and be comfortable. You would probably spend most of that dinner laughing rather than eating.
My interview with Chris Pratt was amazing. I swear we spent more time laughing during the interview than anything else. Many of his answers were funny and totally showed how down to Earth he is.
When we asked him about feeling any added pressure being the face of a new franchise, his answer was:
I guess if I was smart, I would feel pressure on both of them, but I kind of don't.
Which lead us to the question of whether or not he is a fan of the Guardians before he did the film or know anything about them, or if he was a fan of comics in general. His response was:
I think it was maybe sixth grade on I was a fan of comic books. I didn't have a lot, like we didn't- we- we didn't have a ton of money growing up. Comic books are actually not expensive, but if you're broke everything is expensive, so I didn't have a ton of them. I would like to draw the pictures. I loved the artistry, I loved the characters and what they were, I loved the physicality of the heroes. I just like was a big fan of that and was always drawing comic book heroes.
There was one time that I won three hundred bucks playing Bingo with my mom and bought three hundred bucks worth of comic books and one of them was a Guardians of the Galaxy comic book. For me, the stories weren't what grabbed me, it was the covers and it was the cool art on the inside and the outside.
Some of the comics that I had were Ghost Rider, the one with the glow in the dark cover, Bart Man number one, a stack of Richie Riches I got at a garage sale, a big stack of Conan, Icon that had the Infinity gauntlets, some Spider Man, some X-Men, some Wolverine, a lot of Punisher Twenty-ninety-nine.
The story of how Chris got this role was pretty good too. It totally showed us how he really is just like a normal person.
Marvel had circled around me and said what about letting Chris audition for this role for Guardians of the Galaxy. Meanwhile I was like, on the diet roller coaster all the time, so sometimes I was super fat and sometimes I was super fit. At that point, I was super fat and I was like, oh god, I don't want to go audition for this and be told no, so, no, I don't think so. The couple of times they asked me and I wasn’t sure about it. I know James Gunn definitely wasn’t interested in having me in the movie at first (at this point, Chris laughed). I was having an identity crisis of who I was as an actor.
I think he was about who his Peter Quinn was going to be and meanwhile he was testing more and more people and it just wasn’t working. I saw the movie Zero Dark Thirty in the theaters for the first time. I kind of forgot that I had gotten in good shape for that. I was like, oh my gosh, that's right, I can do that. When I saw it, I had already put on like forty pounds in like a month after shooting, and I thought wait a minute, maybe I should be trying to do action-y kind of movies. Until seeing that movie, I had kind of forgotten that I had done that or I didn't know I was capable of that. I said let’s go after it. That's how I got in. Then James was like, Chris, hey look- it's Chris.
We then asked him how it feels knowing you're an iconic hero for younger kids of this generation.
That is to me the greatest part of all this. I remember pretending to be Han Solo in my backyard, or pretending to be Indiana Jones, or Luke Skywalker as a kid. Comic books and storytelling of this magnitude is what really helped me cultivate my imagination as a young kid. To think that kids are going to be out there, and they're going to watch this and they're going to feel that way . . . It's just really I mean, I've been Googling synonyms for surreal just to try to help explain what it feels like.
It's really cool. I think to me that's by far the very greatest feeling is that I'm going to be a hero to these kids. They're going to dress up like StarLord, yes?
That lead to our question of how does it feel to have an action figure doll. I have to admit that his answer to this question totally made me laugh.
That to me is pretty crazy and pretty weird. My friend has a Peter Quill doll that you push a button and- and my voice comes out of it. My friends treat me like Flat Stanley. Everywhere they go, they're taking pictures of my doll and are like, “oh look at Star Lord at Subway”.
My husband has friends who would totally do that, so I can relate! The soundtrack for Guardians of the Galaxy is pretty sweet, so we asked Chris about his favorite song:
I have a contentious relationship with that soundtrack, because I put it on my iPod as my list to run and work out to. I love and hate all of those songs. For me, the best one was probably Ooh Child because there was certain beats (aff) per minute that matched with my running pace. When I'm running, I need to match my feet to the music, so I can forget how terrible it is that I'm running.
We then asked him for his favorite behind the scenes moment:
James (Gunn) kept telling me over and over that he was going to replace me. (At this point, he laughed). It kind of became an ongoing joke that he kept pitching different ideas for actors who he was going to put their face on my face at the end of the movie. I never was offended by it, and I thought it was funny every time he said it. That was really kind of my favorite part about filming this movie was the relationship I had with James.
In terms of our comedy, it matched up really well. It's super inappropriate, and we're constantly trying to outdo one another in, in terms of our inappropriateness. (He laughed again at this point).
I totally loved Chris's response when we asked if he was allowed to improvise during filming:
We had a little room. When you're shooting on a movie like this, you've got to think in terms of seconds. Seconds will cost thousands of dollars. They roll that film and it is costing money. If you're going to improv, you better nail it. If you blow a take trying a joke that no one knew about and you just kind of spit it out, you're wasting time and money .
So that being said, I did improv a lot and I probably wasted a lot of money. (He laughed again.) Some of it made it into the movie and maybe it was worth it.
I can honestly say our interview with Chris Pratt was amazing. Did Chris's reponses surprise you?
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GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXYopens in theaters everywhere on August 1st!