Oh Lord, There Goes That Damn Pratt Boy Again, Bless His Heart

Saturday Morning, Bayou Gauche, Louisiana

An hour late to the photo shoot, the newly cut and beautiful actor Chris Pratt rushes into a small trailer to try on wool suits. It's 90 degrees on this dust patch in the middle of the bayou, forty-five minutes outside New Orleans on a tree-obscured turnoff of a narrow elevated road. Your driver misses a turn out here and it's thirty miles before you get a chance to turn around. Still, the thirty-five-year-old is apologizing as he goes to get dressed in suits that are mostly too small for the action-hero muscles he developed for Guardians of the Galaxy, hewed from the three hundred pounds of comedic-character-actor fat used to great effect on six seasons of Parks and Recreation. But he finds a pair of pants that zip up and takes his place in front of a white backdrop.

The sweating begins immediately and profoundly. A tiny Hungarian hairstylist attempts to cool him off with a tiny motorized fan, and a neighbor in a camo jacket and Duck Dynasty beard waves while urinating on the property line. Pratt has other concerns.

"What should I do with my hands?"

"Pretend you're Bond," says the photographer.

"Bond. Gary Bond. No relation to James. I own a family plumbing company."

"Great, Chris, perfect."

"The lens is a douche magnet. It just pulls it out of my face," he says.

Then he half-puckers his lips and makes perfect "Oh, these eyebrows?" eyebrows.

Everyone gets on the airboats—ladies first, Pratt insists—and they take off. He uses his pant-busting quads to rock the two-thousand-pound boat up and down, spraying swamp at his people, the magazine's people, and Sid the airboat driver and part-owner of this parcel of land and water.

"That's a workout!" he says through teeth clenched around the cigar he produced from his pocket.

He removes the cigar and puts a grasshopper in his mouth.

The grasshopper jumps out and he puts the cigar in his mouth.

Once the airboat gets going, as it's speeding over a liquid wilderness through soupy air, through swarms of dragonflies and the occasional carpenter bee, past crickets and snakes and palmetto bugs and ancient oaks covered in Spanish moss, Pratt turns around to face Sid.

"Which part of the alligator should I grab if I see one?"

Sid is the only one who realizes he's not kidding.

"Behind the head, so he can't get at you with his teeth."

Pratt looks at me.

"But that would be good for the story, wouldn't it? If an alligator bit my hand?"

We get to an abandoned shack (contents: rusted shovel, bare mattress) andPratt fake-demands nine "ice-cold piss beers." He sings an elaborate mash-up of "Get Ready for This" and the America's Next Top Model theme music.

At a bar in the French Quarter a few hours from now, I'll find out he probably wrote that song years ago.

"I've always pretended to improv," he will admit.

Gary Bond?

"Sneaking in a joke like I've stumbled on it, coming up with good comebacks for things that haven't even happened …"

The alligator?

"My whole life I've done that."

The fucking grasshopper?

Saturday Evening, The Sazerac Bar, The Roosevelt Hotel

Pratt exits the elevator into the lobby and is immediately recognized by a fan, despite the baseball cap covering his face. The hat is clearly meant to make him invisible, but we're in a land of rich people wearing elaborate millinery, so it's more like a sandwich board advertising his Other status. When the man greets Pratt, he springs into affability, smiling and shaking the guy's hand, seeming like more an ambassador of Chris Pratt than the man himself. Instantaneously, the hat becomes just a hat, so as not to undermine Pratt's life mission: "Of course I want people to like me, but more importantly, I don't want people to dislike me."

Pratt indicates that I enter the bar first, as if I were one of the elegant southern ladies and not still wearing my DEET-drenched swamp rags. He performs these courtly gestures throughout the evening and at brunch the next morning, standing up every time I get up from or sit down at the table. Tomorrow, he'll reveal that they are a recent affectation picked up from a veteran, a friend whom he met on the set of Zero Dark Thirty.

I ask Pratt for the over/under on how many people will recognize him this evening. Based on the "Aw shucks, I don't know what a dumb-dumb like me is doing here" shtick from yesterday, I expect him to go for a modest six or seven so I can graciously take over. Nope. According to Pratt, there are twenty-five Pratt lovers in our vicinity, or at least twenty-five people who will see a muscle-bound six-foot-two dude with the gilt of importance, that cared-for look and glow of charisma that tells plebes he's somebody they should know, and do a double take. I take under. It's the only sensible move given Pratt's oeuvre—goofy supporting parts in B comedies The Five-Year Engagement and What's Your Number?, minor jock roles in Oscar fare like Moneyball and Zero Dark Thirty. If we were meeting a couple months from now, it wouldn't be a great bet. By then, people will know Pratt as Indiana-Jones-by-way-of-Bart-Simpson space pirate Peter Quill in Marvel's summer blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy. If I were getting drinks with Pratt next year, after Jurassic World comes out, I'd be an idiot to take under.

We get a table and a menu, and he asks me if we're going to drink drink. We are, and we also decide to eat eat, food that I pick from the menu because when he goes to dinner with his wife, the actress Anna Faris, she always decides what they order.

Pratt met Faris in 2007 on the set of Take Me Home Tonight, during the last sputters of her first marriage. She was hot and funny, but she wasn't single, so there were no stakes. Why even bother trying to be the kind of guy she would date? When Faris came over to his apartment, he left porn magazines out. She didn't mind. He detailed sexual encounters he had recently had as a single man in Los Angeles. She was into it. Into it into it? Into it into it. So when she called him to tell him that she had left her husband, Pratt decided he was going to marry her. He also decided he would be more like her, that he would study her and learn her sweet patience the way he's learned to be a gentleman from his military friend.

Evidence that Pratt and Faris are "twin souls": They grew up twenty minutes apart in Washington state. They both have scars on their left hands. (Pratt's from a kitchen accident; Anna's from falling onto a wineglass while shooting Just Friends.) They also plan a lot of what they say and do in advance.

"My whole life I've done that. The best stuff that you hear me say will be stuff that I thought of over the past three years. The best acting I did was pretending that it was improv and sneaking it in like I just stumbled on it.

"I feel like I'm giving away my secrets. Maybe that's okay. That's always worked for me in the past."

Remember the end of Memento, when Guy Pearce finds out that reality as he perceives it is bullshit? Without the luxury of amnesia, you can't forget this information. Once someone tells you they've planned this whole thing out, wouldn't you be an idiot to believe them when they say that admission was impromptu?

I order something with vodka, rhubarb, and heavy cream and, based on its high lactose content and the opium-den-appropriate velvet couch we're sitting on, Pratt decides that the drink is going to be served in a giant breast. He spends fifteen seconds suckling, grabbing the giant imaginary boob with both hands and going hard with his mouth. When the drink actually comes in a regular non-tit glass, he pops the phantom nipple out of his lips.

"Thank you," he says to the waitress.

Pratt started planning bits when he was a kid and his older brother, Cully, would let him hang out with his friends as the group's little mascot. He would do Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and a proto–Andy Dwyer, the doofy, puppyish character Pratt plays on Parks and Recreation and in situations where he wants to project a likable, nonthreatening persona, like talk shows. Pratt has made this kind of artlessness an art.

He's also intense. When he shakes hands, he doesn't drop his gaze or even blink until he's said the person's name twice. Maybe the intensity comes from his childhood rivalry with Cully. They would wrestle for hours and play terrible, winnerless games like slapping each other across the face over and over again. There was also Pratt's dad, "lord and master of the domain," who brought the family from the taconite mines of Minnesota to the gold mines of Alaska to Les Ware Backhoe in Washington state, and of whom Pratt's estimation falls somewhere between infallible and false idol. Dan Pratt was at all of his son's football games and was so devoted that Pratt's friends would tell him they wished Dan was their dad, but he could be insensitive and insular, and after his MS diagnosis in 1993 he wouldn't take his medication and pushed the family away, winding up immobile and alone in an assisted-living facility. Pratt is trying to distill the good parts of the man he loved so ferociously from the whole messy package, strain out the anger that he also feels sometimes, so that his own two-year-old son, Jack Daniel (the first name after Faris's father, the second after Pratt's), will be appropriately afraid of disappointing him but won't feel the need to get into a fistfight with him over the channel changer. Pratt says it soothes him to know that he can also mix in the influence of his mother, a thirty-year veteran of the Safeway checkout line and the person who instilled all this confidence in Pratt. [Editor's note: Pratt's father died as this issue was going to press.]

He believes in this kind of alchemy, formulas that will allow him to succeed if he follows through with the force of his tremendous will. He developed a thirty-point movie-star scoring system—"ten points is the way you sound; ten points is the way you look; and ten points is the rhythm of your soul, the rhythm of your spirit." There are very few thirties, maybe none. Peak Paul Newman. Tom Cruise in the nineties also comes close. ("Great voice, a great look, and his soul has got an interesting rhythm.") Right now, Pratt is a soft twenty-two, but he probably has a five-year plan to eke his way to a twenty-four. He keeps wondering aloud how he will come off in this profile, whether he should be revealing things, how he would feel if actors he admired talked about the things he thinks about.

Imagine if Denzel Washington discussed hunting and the sense of accomplishment or remorse—even tears—that it can evoke. What if the beloved star of Training Day said that when you kill an animal, you're "fucking psychotic. Sometimes you're like a Norse Viking, you're a berserker. I'll take the blood, rub my hands in it, put it on my face"?

That would be awesome.

What if nascent movie star and adorable goofball Chris Pratt told you that?

That would be awesome, too.

Pratt talks about his thirty- or forty-gun arsenal. He bought Faris a gun in the event that a crazy person comes to their house while he's in Louisiana and necessitates her "blowing their fucking brains out." He tells me to print that, just in case Anna Faris's and Esquire's fan demographics overlap. It's not all so primal—Pratt believes in firearm regulation, background checks, and preventing guns from falling into the hands of the mentally ill. He explains population control and hunting licenses and tags and the virtues of eating what you kill. It all makes sense, but it also feels kind of like when Dexter explains that he's a good serial killer because his victims are rapists and murderers. Really, this guy just likes to kill shit.

And then he tells a story.

In 2012, his son was born two months premature, and they didn't know if there would be any permanent consequences of his early birth. He was driving Faris and her parents to the hospital to check on the baby they weren't sure was going to be okay, and a paparazzo following Pratt turned into Pratt following the paparazzo, hunting him, while his terrified passengers begged him to stop. And he knows he wouldn't have killed that guy, but he also sees how he could have. "There's not even time to try to stop and reflect, except for maybe now, doing an interview, talking to somebody. I'm not sure I think about this stuff unless I'm talking about it."

The moment is punctured by some bustling among the bar crowd. Pratt wasn't previously aware of the Belmont Stakes—which has appeared on the TV above us—or of the horse that is about to lose his chance at the Triple Crown, but now he's on his second double Jack Daniel's and getting excited. He leans in close. "Okay, no matter what happens, we're going to freak out and cheer.

"YEAHHHHH!! Come on. Come onnnn … NOOO!!! Why! AHHHHHHH COME ON!!! COME ON!!! Our filly's got it! Is it a stallion? COME ONNNNNNNN Oh. I thought it was over. It's still going? OHHH NOO! Pulling away! Pulling away! NO NO NO NO NOOOOOOO."

We fall back, exhausted from our momentary emotional investment, and talk about female jockeys and using your mind to operate televisions and Pratt's modified margarita recipe (one part margarita mix, one part tequila, a quarter part whiskey, a quarter part Grand Marnier, lime) and his plans to go frog spearing with Willie Robertson, and how everyone is connected through God, he and I and that loser California Chrome.

He has proof.

"In Maui, about four weeks before I was discovered to go to California, I was hanging with my buddy. I wasn't quite old enough to drink, so we got somebody to go in and buy us some alcohol. This guy came by and was like, 'What are you doing tonight?' I was like, 'Oh, I dunno. I was just gonna wait out here, my friends are gonna buy me a bottle of Carlo Rossi and a sixer of Milwaukee's Best Ice. So he's like, 'Will you fornicate tonight?' I was like, 'I hope so.' 'And drugs and drinking?' It's like, 'Most likely, yeah. Probably all three of those things. I mean, at least two of them, possibly all three.' He was like, 'I stopped because Jesus told me to stop and talk to you. He said to tell you you're destined for great things.' My friends came out, and I was like, 'Hey, I'm gonna go with this guy.' I gave my soul to Jesus within, like, two days. I was stuffing envelopes for his organization, Jews for Jesus. I'm not even sure, at that age—I was nineteen years old—I knew what Jewish was."

A few days later, sober and filled with Christian Jew for Jesus vigor, Pratt returned to the beach. He ran into a friend, a pastor's daughter who was smoking meth and "whoring around," and told her what he'd been up to. She asked him to get her to church, he called his new sponsor on a pay phone, and she became a Youth with a Mission pastor.

"I feel a little bit like my entire purpose was to get her."

Pratt says he sees how if a different man had approached him outside the Safeway, a more nefarious "strangely charismatic guy," things could have gone badly. But it was this man who was sent by God to save Pratt from jug wine and that woman from drug addiction. And a month later, while he was waiting tables at the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., a director told him he was special and he moved to California to star in the 2000 horror comedy Cursed Part III.

Is this all destiny?

"I do believe in destiny. I'm lucky. But I didn't walk into 7-Eleven, buy a scratch ticket, scratch it off, and star in Guardians of the Galaxy."

Sunday Morning, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, New Orleans

Pratt's sweating again, so we seek shade behind a crypt, sitting on a short ledge that he clearly finds uncomfortable. Every few minutes he changes position, squatting, then stretching out his giant, muscled legs among the sepulchers of Jean Baptiste Marmoucet and E. Juaquin Ballester and a whole mess of Thibodeux. Pratt wouldn't mind being cremated, but he also wouldn't mind a headstone so he knows where to go to commune with still-corporeal loved ones in the event of an afterlife. He doesn't believe in heaven or anything—he's forsaken the Lutheranism of his youth and Jews for Jesus and is now a free agent for God—but he still speed-prays "Now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep-I-pray-the-Lord-my-soul-to-keep-if-I-die-before-I-wake-I-pray-the-Lord-my-soul-to-take" before he falls asleep, for himself and now for his son, Jack.

We leave the cemetery and walk into the French Quarter streets wearing eau de New Orleans: roasting asphalt and strip-club floors and horse manure that Pratt insists smells great. There's an enormous dumpster in front of us, as tall as his ribs. He'd told me the day before that he does forty-inch box jumps for his Jurassic World training, but this is even higher than that.

I dare him to jump on top of it. He's already lost the wager about how many people would recognize him—only eight do—and this offers potential redemption.

He crouches down and all of a sudden he's not on the hot, filthy street but on top of the hot, filthy trash container, fast and impossible. It's incredible. People are watching him now. They don't seem to know who the hell he is, but they're watching.

But before you go...

When Guardians of the Galaxy was pitched to me, I said, "I don't think so." I just didn't picture myself getting the role. I didn't want to go and embarrass myself like I did when I auditioned for G.I. Joe a couple of years previously. I went in there, and halfway through I saw the director's eyes just glaze over. It made sense—I was a little heavy and out of shape. I was not gonna play someone from G.I. Joe. I did not look like a G.I. Joe action figure come to life.

It's a thing when it becomes three peoples' job to mop sweat off of you. The hair person, the makeup person, an assistant. When their primary job becomes stopping you from sweating? But I sweat less now that I'm in better shape. When I was fat, it could be ice cold in a room and I would sweat.

It was getting to the point where I would wake up in the middle of the night and I wasn't breathing. A little bit of sleep apnea. My neck was pushing down on my throat, so my sleep felt like it was panicked all night.

I like clothes now. I have more energy. I sleep better. My sex drive is up. Blood's flowing. I'm less susceptible to impulse. I'm in a different mode. When I was way out of shape, the idea of using whitening strips on my teeth seemed terrible. I have to do that every day? I'll never do it. What you want is instant results when you're out of shape. You want your teeth whitened in 45 minutes with the use of lasers. But when you're in shape, you know it's the result of doing a little bit every day. Moments aren't just moments. A moment might be a week or a month. So instead of Boy, I'd love to eat this hamburger right now, I'm considering a little further into the future. I'm thinking, I eat that hamburger and that's 1,200 calories, and I'm gonna work out tomorrow and lose 800 calories. I may as well eat a salad here, still do that workout, and then I'm actually making progress.

You have to eat protein. You can't have hashbrowns, or burgers, or anything fried. You can't have carbs. You have to work out five times a week.

But I can do 40-inch box jumps now. Action-hero physical stuff. Jumping that high feels really good. You see a giant hillside, and you think, I wanna get up that. You see a building, you think, I could climb that. When you get in shape, the world around you becomes things you wanna jump on and climb up.