Garfield star Chis Pratt on moving past being the ‘fat, funny guy’ during his couch potato era
Chris Pratt reveals how he became one of Hollywood’s most bankable action stars after worrying he would get stuck only auditioning for “jerk boyfriend” roles.
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CHRIS Pratt isn’t quite sure how he feels about being the first choice to provide the voice of the lazy, overweight, lasagne-guzzling feline Garfield in the new animated movie based on the much loved comic strip.
“I like that I was first choice, but I never quite put it together the things he saw in me,” he says, with a laugh over Zoom call from Los Angeles. “Oh wow. I guess it’s sort of a backhanded compliment?”
The nearly 50-year-old Garfield, one of the most syndicated comic strips (and merchandised) in the world, has been adapted for the big screen several times before, most notably with Bill Murray giving a languid, laconic take on the Monday-hating, orange, striped cat.
But for this new version director Mike Dindal was adamant that Pratt, who already had hugely successful voice acting credentials thanks to two hit Lego Movies and the billion-dollar smash that was The Super Mario Bros. Movie, was the man for job from the outset. Inspired by the “laziness and sarcasm” they heard in his voice, they even did some test animation set to Pratt chatting about his love for food on a talk show.
“Actually, I was honoured,” says Pratt of the personal approach, adding that he had been a fan of the comic strip since before he could even read.
“In fact, it took a lot of the pressure off when he said ‘listen. I’ve been working on this for a couple years, but I pictured your voice the whole time. I’ve always pictured Garfield sounding like you. He’s got a sarcastic tone and a bit of a lazy tone, and I think you’d be perfect for it’. I was like ‘great, so I don’t have to sound like anybody else? I know how to do that’.”
In 2024, with his ability to blend improvisational humour and high-octane action, the wisecracking and extremely buff Pratt is one of the most bankable stars around, in no small part due to the multibillion-dollar Jurassic World and Guardians of the Galaxy franchises. But it wasn’t always that way, and he says that trying to get inside the head of a food-obsessed house pet took him back to what he calls his “couch potato phase”.
When he first tried to break into Hollywood, as one of countless good-looking aspiring actors in top shape, all he ended up auditioning for were roles like “jerk boyfriend or bad guy who needs to be kicked in the nuts at the end of the show”.
It wasn’t until he stacked on weight to play the dim but loveable Andy Dwyer, the schlubby, slacker boyfriend of Rashida Jones’ Ann Perkins in Parks and Recreation, that he felt he was starting to get somewhere. The character was originally meant to be temporary but the “40 pounds overweight” Pratt made him so likeable that the producers promoted him to the main cast and he ended up staying for seven seasons.
“I found that towards the end of Parks and Rec in the summers I would lose weight but every season I got bigger and bigger and bigger and I found that it really suited the character,” he recalls. “I remember I saw an episode of Parks and Rec at home and I was ‘God, I look fat’ and then I was like ‘but hey, I’ve never been so funny – this is working’.
“So I started getting this work that was really rewarding and fun. I was getting laughs, I was getting singled out on this great show by critics and stuff. I was like ‘damn, this is really working, maybe this is my niche’. I found some work as an actor and I don’t have to go back to being a waiter. I can be the fat, funny guy and sweat a lot and I did that for about seven years.”
Pratt admits that during that time, the way he felt that the industry saw him affected the way he saw himself. It wasn’t until the Oscar-nominated 2011 sports drama Moneyball, in which he played a professional baseballer (based on real player Scott Hatteburg) opposite Brad Pitt’s trailblazing manager Billy Beane, that he began to shift both perceptions.
“Billy Beane was being played by Brad Pitt who’s 5’10”, probably 185 pounds and I was 6’2” and 285 pounds. And they were like, ‘you look Shrek next to this guy – so if you want get this role, you have to lose weight’.”
After working out for three months to lose 13kg, he scored the role and caught the eye of Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow, who was casting around for roles in her Iraq War drama Zero Dark Thirty.
“Then I went back to Parks and Rec and put on 50 pounds over the course of six months which I’m sure was really good for my heart. Then at the end of that she was like ‘I want you to play a Navy SEAL’ and I said ‘great’.
“So then I played a Navy SEAL and as I was watching that, I was looking at the industry as a mirror and I was like ‘wow – they believed me as this kind of hard-core dude, who can kick doors down and shoot Osama bin Laden or whatever’. And that was the moment I was like ‘okay, I think I’m out of jail as an actor – I can start going for leading man roles’.”
He’d also gained enough confidence in his comedic abilities thanks to Parks and Recreation that he was able to go after the kind of leading man roles that had elements of action and laughs. At the time, his manager was trying to convince him to throw his hat in the ring for the part of Star-Lord in James Gunn’s then little-known Guardians of the Galaxy, but having been passed over for just about every other Marvel project to date (he didn’t even get a call-back to be one of Thor’s sidekicks), he wasn’t keen.
“I had already passed on auditioning for that a couple times because I didn’t want to go through the pain of being rejected by Marvel – again,” he recalls with a laugh. “Then finally I was like ‘all right, I’ll do it – but I’m going to do exactly what I want to do’. And I went in and did exactly what I wanted to do and there were like ‘hey that’s perfect’. So that was the next incremental, but relatively large step forward in my career.”
The first Lego Movie, with Pratt in the lead role as Emmet Brickowski, came out the same year that Guardians of Galaxy was released, and he’s been a fan of voice work ever since, with his distinctive tones also featuring in Pixar’s Onward, and last year’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which earned a mighty $2 billion at the box office. Actors often say that part of the appeal of voice work for animated films is the ability to turn up to work in sweat pants, but given Pratt’s frequency and success in the genre, surely it’s more than that?
“Well, it’s not more than that,” says the father of three, who is married to author Katherine Schwarzenegger (yes, Arnie is his father-in-law). “I mean, maybe a little more than that, but showing up your sweatpants is pretty great. I’m a family man now and on my list of priorities, being present with my kids and my wife is right at the top, and so this is the kind of work that can allow me to be home, which is nice.”
When pressed on the matter, he concedes that the collaborative and improvisational aspects of bringing to life and animated character mean that it’s “the kind of work that’s really kind of tailored to my strengths as a performer”.
“There’s no vanity,” he says. “I don’t have to think about what I look like. That’s nice – it frees me up. I tend to colloquialise a lot of my dialogue anyways, so … I don’t know if I could do (playwright David) Mamet because he would be like ‘say what I wrote’. And I’d be ‘well, I want to day what I want to say’ and he’d be like ‘you’re fired’.”
The Garfield Movie opens in cinema on May 30.
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