I just cleaned up my diet and my life — Chris Pratt’s jaw-dropping shift from chubby guy to hunk

HAVING once tipped the scales at 136kg, Chris Pratt thought he was too fat to ever play a superhero. He was wrong. And the transformation is jaw-dropping.

“I’d always thought I was too fat to be a superhero,” says Pratt, here with Vince Vaughn in <i>Delivery Man</i>. Picture: Supplied

RECENTLY, Chris Pratt found himself in the midst of a career identity crisis.

“I didn’t know what I was — if I was an action guy or a comedy guy,” says the affable Pratt, kicking back at an outdoor cafe on the backlot of Disney Studios in Los Angeles.

Admittedly, he’d forged a pretty fine livelihood by playing the “funny sidekick” (he’s best known as the oafish-yet-lovable Andy Dwyer on Parks and Recreation), but brief roles in Moneyball and 2013 Best Picture Oscar-winner Zero Dark Thirty convinced him he was capable of more.

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This image released by Disney - Marvel shows Chris Pratt in a scene from "Guardians Of The Galaxy." (AP Photo/Disney - Marvel)

“Before Zero Dark Thirty, I’d played the same kind of guy in every movie — play the dummy, get the laughs and goof around. It’s been a survival mechanism for me, and it’s easy for me to fall back into that,” he says.

“Then I saw the movie and it redefined how I saw myself as an actor. I was like, oh, wait a minute, this is something I can do.”

One of those jobs was for Guardians Of The Galaxy, the big-screen adaptation of the little-known Marvel comic book.

DM-04038R-075..Affable underachiever, David Wozniak (Vince Vaughn, left) seeks advice from his friend and attorney, Brett (Chris Pratt) when he discovers that his anonymous donations to a fertility clinic twenty years earlier resulted in 533 children in DreamWorks Pictures' "Delivery Man"...Ph: Jessica Miglio..©DreamWorks II Distribution Co., LLC. ÊAll Rights Reserved.

Unlike Marvel’s other wildly popular franchises, Galaxy had a small — but rabid — band of fans.

And they weren’t interested in Pratt taking on the role of their beloved Star-Lord.

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM - JULY 25: Chris Pratt attends the "Guardians of the Galaxy" photocall on July 25, 2014 in London, England. (Photo by Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images)

“People didn’t see me in this kind of a role. I’m not sure I even saw myself in this kind of a role. I’d always thought I was too fat to be a superhero,” says Pratt.

“Your fellow Aussie Chris Hemsworth, now he looks like a superhero.”

He had to do a fair amount of convincing to get director James Gunn on board. Gunn wanted an actor to do for Guardians what Robert Downey Jr had done for Iron Man. And to him, that wasn’t the “chubby guy”.

When he finally did see him, the director was won over. “Within 20 seconds I was like, holy s---, that’s the guy we’ve been looking for.

“And I’m like, the world’s going to have to be ready for the first chubby superhero,” Gunn says.

In the film, Pratt plays Peter Quill (aka Star-Lord), a planet-hopping thief abducted from Earth as a kid by the shady Rondu (Michael Rooker), who enlists him to take on the villainous Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace).

Quill takes charge of his own band of misfits: Zoe Saldana playing the green-skinned assassin Gamora, former WWE wrestler Dave Bautista as vengeance-seeking brute Drax and two CGI characters — the raccoon-like creature Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and the walking tree Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel).

Simply, Pratt is perfect in the role. Like Harrison Ford before him, he’s got swagger, he’s arrogant, he’s flawed, and he’s just funny.

Much, of course, has been made of how Pratt physically transformed himself. For a bloke who once tipped the scales at 136kg, the turnaround has been jaw-dropping.

This image released by Disney - Marvel shows, from left, Zoe Saldana, the character Rocket Racoon, voiced by Bradley Cooper, Chris Pratt, the character Groot, voiced by Vin Diesel and Dave Bautista in a scene from "Guardians of the Galaxy." The movie releases on Friday, Aug. 1, 2014. (AP Photo/Disney - Marvel)

The 35-year-old, who has spoken in the past of the travails of both losing and gaining weight for movie roles, reckons Guardians completely changed his perspective on health and fitness for good.

“I totally embraced it. It sort of defined who I was throughout the whole year. I just wanted to become the character — not in any kind of pretentious method-y way, but I wanted to physically transform myself to look like a character from a comic book.

“I really just kind of cleaned up my diet and my life — it really just changed everything for me,” he says.

Actress Anna Faris and actor Chris Pratt attend the world premiere of "Guardians Of The Galaxy" on July 21, 2014 at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, California. AFP PHOTO / Robyn Beck

Pratt is married to Anna Faris, star of The Scary Movie series, The House Bunny, Entourage and veritable pin-up for teenage boys everywhere.

The two married in 2009 after meeting on the set of the largely forgettable comedy Take Me Home Tonight, and are parents to a two-year-old son, Jack.

“Before, we were worried about getting this role or that role, but now it’s all about his happiness,” Pratt says.

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 29: (L-R) Actors Lee Pace, Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana and Vin Diesel attend The Cinema Society with Men's Fitness & FIJI Water host a screening of "Guardians of the Galaxy" on July 29, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Andrew Toth/Getty Images for FIJI Water)

Originally published as I just cleaned up my diet and my life — Chris Pratt’s jaw-dropping shift from chubby guy to hunk