Chris Pratt, Vanity Fair’s February cover man, is a Hollywood darling. But that’s a relatively new status for the star of Jurassic World and Passengers. In fact, Pratt—a community college dropout who made his break while waiting tables in Hawaii—is very outspoken about God’s hand in his life.
“Chris Pratt’s rise to fame is so improbable he sees it as divinely ordained,” began Vanity Fair Contributing Editor Rich Cohen, who interviewed the actor at his L.A. home.
In 2000, Pratt was a beach bum with a penchant for acting and a job at Bubba Gump Shrimp. On a day he wasn’t even supposed to have a shift, he ended up waiting the table of star Rae Dawn Chong, who asked if he acted. “F--k, yeah, I act. Put me in a movie,” Pratt remembered responding.
That relationship lead to a lead role in Cursed Part 3, a short film that was actually never released. “It was the worst movie I’d ever seen,” Pratt admitted to Cohen. But that was the beginning of the actor’s career.
Shortly before meeting Chong, Pratt had encountered a man outside of a grocery store while he was waiting for his friends to purchase alcohol for a party. The man approached him and declared: “Jesus told me to talk to you.” As Pratt recounted to Cohen, “At that moment I was like, I think I have to go with this guy. He took me to church. Over the next few days I surprised my friends by declaring that I was going to change my life.”
This story dumbfounded Cohen. “O.K. Let’s stop for a moment,” the editor wrote. “Because this is strange and so distant from what we expect of a movie star, especially of the clever, slapdash, wise-guy variety. But everyone needs a story to make sense of their life. Even the most successful. The extreme demands explanation. For Pratt, success, so extreme it scared him, is explained by metaphysical intervention. Which caused him to take control. In that moment, he yielded. His path has been clear ever since.”
Cohen is certainly right. Coming from an A-lister, words like Pratt’s are unusual and unexpected. And the actor has not been shy about highlighting his faith in God and dedication to his family.
Finishing the interview, which centered around a meal that Pratt prepared for Cohen, the latter concluded: “Just before we sat to eat, he [Pratt] got on his knees and had the rest of us get on our knees, and we held hands, and he thanked God for the food and the life, and he even put in a word for the Cubs.”
Now that’s beautiful.
