From a beach tent in Maui to $15 billion at the box office
Chris Pratt once lived out of a van and a tent on a Hawaiian beach, working just enough hours to pay for gas and fishing gear. A director spotted him waiting tables at a Bubba Gump restaurant. Films he has led have since grossed more than $15.2 billion worldwide.
Pratt was born on June 21, 1979, in Virginia, Minnesota, to a supermarket worker and a father who mined and remodelled houses. The family moved to Alaska, left partly out of fear of bears, and then drifted through some twenty homes around the country before settling near Seattle in Lake Stevens. He spent a $300 bingo win entirely on comic books and told his high-school wrestling coach he would be famous and rich, with no plan at all for how.
He quit community college within a semester, sold discount tickets and ended up homeless on Maui. At nineteen, actress Rae Dawn Chong noticed his charm while he was waiting tables and cast him in her short horror film Cursed Part 3. Small television parts followed, including the drama Everwood, and in 2009 he joined Parks and Recreation as Andy Dwyer, a role meant to be temporary. Producers liked him so much they kept him until 2015.
Weight became a recurring plot. Told he was too heavy to play the ballplayer Scott Hatteberg in Moneyball, he dropped 30 pounds in three months and mailed the casting director a photo. For Jurassic World he ate about 4,000 calories a day while training.
2014 was the turn. He voiced Emmet in The Lego Movie and, after first refusing because of earlier humbling auditions, played Star-Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy once casting director Sarah Finn talked director James Gunn round. That film took $773.3 million, and he went on to play the character in six Marvel films. Jurassic World grossed $1.67 billion in 2015, briefly the third-highest total ever. He ranked among the world's best-paid actors from 2015 to 2017, and since 2020 his company Indivisible Productions has made The Terminal List, which paid him a reported $1.4 million an episode.
Source: Chris Pratt
