Today you are going to learn all about Chris Pratt, and the biggest thing you’ll learn is that he is awesome. That’s probably not a shock to you. Chances are you’ve seen Pratt in a movie or a TV show in recent years and you’ve thought to yourself, That guy looks kind of cool. So many actors seem like cocks, but I would hang with that guy! Your instincts have served you well. Chris Pratt is as advertised. He is not a cock.
The fact that he starred in two of the biggest movies this year—The Lego Movie and Guardians of the Galaxy (both of which featured the word awesome in their theme music)—is but the tip of the iceberg. Pratt’s awesomeness can be subdivided into no fewer than forty-one parts. I only spent a day with the guy, and in that day we shot guns, we grilled dead animals, we got mad at as shole drivers, we busted out some really good whiskey, we smoked cigars, we hung out at his house, we talked about strippers and compound bows, and he told highly amusing stories about Mickey Rourke and David Letterman being dicks. All of that is awesome. None of that is lame. I don’t really want to share Pratt with you, frankly. HANDS OFF I SAW HIM FIRST.
Yep, it’s gonna get very journo-porny around here, and I apologize in advance. But Pratt is a one-man industry of awesome. He is a BuzzFeed listicle that your mommy forwards to you, in human form. So let’s turn this thing into an awesome Chris Pratt-icle starting NOW.
1. Chris Pratt will bring all the firearms to the party.
I don’t have to pack anything for today’s man-date in Los Angeles. Pratt’s bringing the guns, the ammo, and the clay pigeons. Later, he will also insist on paying our grocery tab. He picks me up outside my hotel in his blood red Ford F-150 Raptor pickup. A big kick-ass American FUCK YOU truck. You could fit Oklahoma inside it. Where did he get this truck? I’m glad I’m pretending you asked!
2. He bought the truck two weeks ago, on the way back from a bachelor party in Reno. It was a chill bachelor party. A mature, stripper-free bachelor party. Just a bunch of guys sitting around, getting smashed on homemade whiskey. "I was pretty worthless the whole weekend," he says. He bought the truck and drove it back to L.A. in time to be on the set of Parks and Recreation the next morning. How could Pratt make a $50,000 impulse purchase just like that?
3. Because Chris Pratt motherfucking owned everyone’s motherfucking shit this year. He starred in the number one and number three highest-grossing movies of 2014: Guardians of the Galaxy, in which he surprised everyone by deftly anchoring a new Marvel Studios franchise, and The Lego Movie, which surprised everyone by being a razor-sharp, legitimately funny comedy and not a glorified toy commercial. The massive success of Guardians was a particular shock, given that Pratt had never headlined a movie before, and given that no one had previously given a crap about Guardians (apologies to the comic’s three loyal fanboys), and given that Pratt, playing a character named Star-Lord, spent the movie surrounded by a green alien, a homicidal raccoon, and a grunting tree. But he pulled that off, even though...
4. Everyone originally thought he was too fat for the role. "I thought it was an insane idea to cast the fat guy from Parks and Rec as the lead of our superhero movie," says Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn. "I didn’t really even want to see him." You can probably guess what happened next: Skeptical director brings in fat, unheralded actor for an audition and is BLOWN AWAY, so much so that...
5. Star-Lord was almost fat. Says Gunn: "I thought, Well, hell, he’s overweight, but if that means we have the world’s first overweight superhero, I’m okay with it." Pratt didn’t see the problem, either. "You can make a talking raccoon that looks real," he told me. "Why can’t I just be fat?"
6. But he lost the weight and got ripped anyway... "I like the challenge of it."
7. ...and now he says Fat Pratt is gone for good. [1] "I’m done with that," he says. The week after we meet, he’ll be hosting the season premiere of SNL, so he’s on a no-starch (BOO) and no-booze (BOOOOO) diet. "I just feel like, if I drink, I want to drink a case of beer and not two beers. Two beers doesn’t do anything for me." Attaboy. When I tell him I had pancakes for breakfast this morning, I see the ghost of Fat Pratt. "That sounds so goddamn good."
8. Chris Pratt loves shootin’ stuff! When Chris was 3, his father, Dan,[2] moved the family to a gold-mining camp (9. His dad was a gold miner, yo) in remote Alaska. They lived there for about four years—until Pratt’s father realized it was too dangerous for three little kids "because there’s fuckin’ bears and shit everywhere," Chris recalls. The Pratts eventually relocated to Washington State, but Alaska is where Chris’s lifelong love of guns began.
We arrive at Angeles Shooting Ranges, on the outskirts of Los Angeles. We’re here to blow up some clay pigeons with shotguns, and it’s louder than hell. There’s a dude in a LeBron Cavs jersey firing an assault rifle. There are big men teaching tiny women how to fire big-ass handguns. The BANGS and POPS and PINGS come from all directions, as if everyone is shooting at frying pans. It sounds like a Looney Tunes shoot-out. We’re going to need earplugs. I buy a couple of cheap foamies, and of course one gets stuck in my ear, because God wants to make me look stupid in front of my new BFF. Stupid God.
10. Chris Pratt will pull a jammed earplug out of your ear for you. I ask for some help, and with no hesitation, Pratt digs right into my ear canal and yanks it out.
Are we wax brothers now?
"Yeah, we’re wax bros," he says. "That’s just a little bit grosser than blood brothers."
Now we’re ready to shoot. Pratt has brought two shotguns for us to use: a single-shot breakaway, his first gun (11. He bought it with his babysitting money when he was 12), and a single-barrel pump-action fella he inherited from his uncle—the kind of weapon that makes you feel like Al Capone sticking up a bank vault. Are these the only guns Pratt owns? Hell no!
12. Pratt’s got a lotta guns! He’s got many more at home, plus another stash up in Washington State, which is where he keeps all his guns that aren’t legal in California. "It’s really more just about collecting shit," he says of his cache of arms. He’s not the type to go running out for ammo when a school gets shot up. "People are scared that they’re not gonna be able to shoot anymore or something; I think people are being taken advantage of a little bit, probably."
13. ...And a compound bow! "I remember one day I texted him and said, ’I’m in your neighborhood—are you around?’ " says Lego Movie co-director Chris Miller. "He happened to be practicing his compound bow in the backyard, and he gave me a lesson, and he had all these targets set up in the back. I want to say that the target was a pretend animal? Like a pretend raccoon or something?"
14. Chris Pratt is an excellent shot. He opens up a cardboard box filled with clay pigeons—round discs the color of traffic cones and fragile as eggs. In the booth there’s a mechanical thrower with a pedal you press with your foot to launch each disc into the air. Pratt steps on the pedal and the clay disc soars up into the air. Pratt gets a bead on it with his old Wonderboy gun, and as it hangs in the sky, he pulls the trigger and the disc is atomized. Bits of neon orange spray in every possible direction, like footage of a galaxy being born. Pratt goes five for five. He can even shoot lefty.
15. Chris Pratt is generous with his wisdom about how to blow shit out of the sky. He hands me the breakaway. "Put it nice and tight against your cheek," he says, "so when you move, you’re moving your gun with your body." Got it. The wood is cold and smooth when I nuzzle against it. I gotta make sure NOT to shoot Pratt, because lots of people would be mad if I shot Pratt in the face, except for maybe Pratt. He’d probably be like, It’s okay, buddy! You’ll do better next time. He calls me "buddy" a lot. We’re buddies! Maybe we’ll go rock climbing. I don’t need my regular loser friends anymore.
PULL!
And I nail the pigeon, seeing it blow up like a bright orange paintball pellet, raining down clay shards on the scruffy turf below. It smells like camp. It makes me want to hunt real animals. It makes me want to hunt man.
All this gun shooting has gotten me hungry, which is good, because...
16. Chris Pratt’s got dead doves in his freezer at home. He shot them a while back, and now we’re driving back to his place to grill them up. Pratt also hunts pheasant, deer, elk...
17. But what he really loves is killin’ coyotes. He shoots and skins and tans them by hand.
18. Sometimes he cleans coyote skins with his own piss! "I do a lot of predator hunting, farm varmints, out in Wyoming. Oh, my God. Get a farmer that’s just got too many and he’s like, ’Fuckin’ kill as many as you want.’ I used to go on VarmintFinders.com"—NOTE: Link was sadly expired when I tried it—"and the farmers would sign up, and the hunters would sign up, and the farmers will give you exclusive access to their land. So we’d go out there, and the marshal would come out and go, ’Hey, what are you guys doing out here?’ And I’d be like, ’Hey, fuckin’ Jethro Willoughby or whoever said we could.’ "
Does your wife like you hunting down Wile E.?
"She"—in case this is news to you, she is Anna Faris, the mega-talented comic actress—"doesn’t like me coyote hunting. She’s like, ’You’re not gonna eat it.’ I’m like, ’Yeah, I guess you’re right. I just like to kill ’em.’ Coyotes are assholes, and they’ll eat your dog."
19. Pratt has Faris’s name programmed into his truck’s Bluetooth as "Anna, my love." Not just "Anna." Awwwwww. That would be totally cute were it not for the fact that it doesn’t work. He’s trying to reach her now. "Call ’Anna, my love.’ Call ’Anna, my love.’ Oh, you fuckin’ asshole."
We stop at a Safeway near Pratt’s house in the Hollywood Hills. Our shopping list is for dove-roll ingredients: bacon, cream cheese, jalapeños. As it turns out, Pratt has an unlikely connection to Safeway.
20. His mom still works as a meat packer at a Safeway in Washington and has for the past twenty-nine years. I ask Pratt if his mom likes working for them. "They’re fuckin’ assholes," he says. "They’re the worst."
21. (Pratt isn’t afraid to take on BIG GROCERY.)
Why doesn’t she quit?
"Well, she’s about one year from retirement."
Yeah, but you’ve got money now. You could buy her a house.
22. "Oh, I bought her a house."
We’ve got our groceries, and it’s time to head back to the Pratt/Faris abode. We pull up behind a line of cars turning left at a stoplight.
23. He gets road-ragey about traffic, just like you and I do! "See these cars on the right?" Pratt says. "They’re gonna cut in, and someone’s gonna cut in front of me. And I’m gonna want to run ’em over. It’s gonna make my fucking blood boil. I don’t have it in me to be the dick who cuts in. But I also don’t have it in me to not get fucking super aggro at the dude who does it."
One dude, indeed, does it. It’s a guy in a Porsche, because of course it is. And here is where the real Chris Pratt diverges ever so slightly from the friendly-Labrador Pratt you see on-screen. He is intense and driven—as driven as any other big-name actor. He just doesn’t seem intense and driven, which is good, because actors who do (see: Cruise, Tom; also Smith, Will) are annoying. Fat guys from workplace sitcoms don’t become action heroes by accident. It takes a healthy amount of talent, and training, and BALLS. Consider this story:
24. Pratt got his Parks and Rec job by completely ignoring the scene outline. This turned out to be wise, because his character was originally based on James Woods’s character in Casino. 25. (!!!!!!) And also:
26. He often doesn’t know what scene he’s shooting. Says Parks co-creator Mike Schur: "When we have new directors on the show, I’ll say, ’He’s gonna roll into the set about twelve minutes before the scene starts shooting. He’ll come not knowing what scene it is. He won’t have read his lines, or he’ll have read them a few times, like, last night. And when the cameras start rolling, he will do something that is so different and unexpected that you’ll be shocked and scared. By the time you’re done with the scene, he will have done it eight different ways with eight great performances, and you’ll have an embarrassment of riches.’ "
27. Pratt’s Parks and Rec pal Nick Offerman did not think Pratt was awesome when they first met. This was at a pool party at Justin Long’s house, well before Parks was ever cast. Offerman: "Chris came over and sat down, and I thought, Oh great, who’s this meathead? Obviously he’s very beautiful, but he must be dumb as a post. And then he proceeded to be perfectly sweet and absolutely sharp as a tack, and I thought, Oh, I see. You’re a superhero." Which is precisely what Pratt has become.
28. Pratt and Offerman enjoy harmonizing their farts. Offerman: "We enjoy being gassy animals together, much to our own delight and the abject horror of the rest of the company."
29. Pratt’s ready to move on from Parks. This will be Parks’ last season, and Pratt says it should be. "I think there’s a collective feeling that people are creatively spent. You kind of run out of ideas. You have to bring in a lot of guest stars and mix it up, and all of a sudden, ideas that might not have been good enough for season two—that’s our episode, you know?"
30. Anna Faris! We’re at the house now. We pass through the garage to bring the groceries inside, and there’s a coyote pelt on the wall. I do not ask if the pelt has been urinated on. Faris greets everyone with kisses. She’s thawed out the dead-dove meat so we can get down to business. The couple’s 2-year-old son, Jack, is also here, screaming out "I’m happy!" Which is actually a little miracle, because...
31. Jack survived a terrifying premature birth. He was born nine weeks early, spent a month in the NICU, and needed hernia surgery. Now’s he’s healthy enough to go to preschool and get shushed by jackass celebrities. I’ll let Pratt explain:
32. Mickey Rourke once shushed Jack on an airplane. Pratt says this happened when Jack was freaking out on a long trip and Faris was trying desperately to calm him down. "Like SHHHH! Like he’s the baby whisperer. Like he’s gonna get the baby to stop crying when the baby’s mother can’t, just by aggressively shushing the baby. Motherfucker. I was like, ’Damn, the fuckin’ Wrestler shushed my baby.’ "
Okay, time to cook!
33. Pratt makes a mean dove roll. We’re in the kitchen now, and Pratt lays out the small fillets of breast meat on the kitchen island, tucks a slice of jalapeño and a dab of cream cheese into each piece, then rolls them up in the bacon. I skewer the rolls, making rows of dense, gamy meat kebabs. We bring the rolls outside and fire up the grill. Pratt lays down the kebabs, and immediately there is smoke. A ton of smoke. The kind of smoke that will alarm a spouse. The kind of smoke that a husband will try to pass off as no big deal, even when it ends up burning down the whole house. "Would you mind closing that kitchen door just so the smoke alarm doesn’t go off?" he asks. I’m on it. I’d make a quality celebrity-entourage member.
34. Pratt says grace on behalf of all the animals he’s killed. The dove rolls are now off the flames. Pratt, Faris, and I join hands at the table and bow our heads. "I’m sorry, but anytime I kill something, before I eat it, I like to say a quick prayer—just ’cause we did waste this guy. Lord, thank you for these wonderful doves. Thank you for this wonderful food and for this company and for our home and our life. We’re very grateful to be here and pray for the safety of our men and women overseas and for our families and for [Faris’s cousin] and their baby that’s coming right now, as we speak. Lord, let her be healthy and let them be happy. Amen."
35. Dove tastes great. Like squab. Though I do have to spit out a little bit of bird shot. That’s okay, though. Bird shot makes you tough. I’ll eat bird shot. I’ll put it in my goddamn pancakes.
36. You get free sketch comedy at the Pratt-family dinner table. Faris notices the mustache stamps on our hands from the gun range and feigns outrage. "What’s that stamp?" she asks me. "You guys went to a strip club and got prostitutes. Oh, I get it now. I get it."
"Honey, we shot prostitutes," Pratt says. "You’d be proud of us."
Faris turns to me. "I’m gonna have to tell your wife that you guys slept with prostitutes."
"Male prostitutes," Pratt adds. "Mustachioed—thick-mustachioed—male prostitutes."
Faris breaks kayfabe, and I breathe a sigh of relief. She is a world-class actress, obviously, and for a second there I really did think she was going to call my wife.
We clean up, and Faris brings out whiskey and cigars and tiny ice cream cones. (For real, they’re the size of Matchbox cars.) This is Pratt’s "cheat night" for his SNL diet, and this sad mini-cone is what counts for cheating when you want to stay jacked. So we’ve got our ice cream, Pratt has his stogie, and I get to have some whiskey.
37. Chris Pratt and Anna Faris have a lot of good whiskey. She offers me my pick of many fancy bottles with many tasteful labels. There’s a color of Johnnie Walker I haven’t seen before. Johnnie Walker Violet, maybe? "Let me give you something of stature," Faris says. Pratt recommends a bottle with a fox on it.
38. The foxy bourbon is delicious. The three of us move out back to the veranda with the whiskey and the cigars, like nineteenth-century robber barons. Pratt and Faris are both extremely famous now. They’re both on successful TV shows. They’ve both starred in big movies. They’ve both done Letterman.
39. Pratt says Letterman "was not very nice to Anna when she was on the show. So I was a little bit hesitant. Even my mom—who knows nothing about Hollywood and is the least cynical person on the planet—was like, ’Letterman was kind of a dick to her.’ So I went in there, and I was ready. If he says one mean thing, I’m coming after him. And I come out, and he could not have fucking been nicer.") But out here in the cool night air, the OH SHIT THEY’RE FAMOUS vibe vaporizes, and you’re left hanging out with two normal, enjoyable people, two people you would like to hang out with more often. They might be huge stars, but they’re just Chris and Anna to me, gang. Maybe right after I left the house, they DID go shoot some hookers. But as far as I saw? NORMAL.
Faris goes up to bed. ("Please write about what a dutiful wife I am," she requests. Noted.) Pratt and I are left to talk about what he’s gonna do now that he’s a big swinging dick in these parts.
40. What he really wants to do is direct. In fact, Pratt ecutive-produced a documentary about his high school wrestling team a couple of years ago. "I’m always biting my tongue," he says."When I’m on set, I kind of wish I could just tell everybody what to do. If I could tell everybody what to do, it would be great, and it would be done faster. And so that’s what I’m working toward. I want control. I want control over something. I have to get better at writing, because the stuff that I have written, no one bought. Maybe they’ll buy it now, because they can put my name on it, but I’d be in a bad movie that I wrote. So I just want to make sure that I stay working hard. I think I will. I hope I will."
And he will. He’ll keep making big movies and keep getting better, because he’s a natural and because...
41. Chris Pratt is awesome.
**DREW MAGARY **(@drewmagary) is a GQ correspondent and is also now BFFs with Chris Pratt forever.
Notes:
1. You could argue this is not awesome.
2. While Pratt’s 2014 was undeniably awesome, I must pause here to note that much of it was rendered bittersweet by his father’s death in June after a long battle with multiple sclerosis. It was expected, but still early—Dan was 60. "Nothing grounds you like facing mortality or seeing your father die," Chris says. "It made me realize that the older you get, the more likely it is that someone you care about—your parents; heaven forbid, a sibling or a child, even—will be taken away. There’s no avoiding it. I got basically all the way till I was 35 until I had suffered my first great loss, so I have it pretty good."