Chris Pratt Conquers The World

Chris Pratt is slowing down.

The chauffeured car he’s in, a perk (or just a sad byproduct, depending on when you ask him) of the months-long press tour for Jurassic World, is pulling up towards his house somewhere in the hills. It’s obvious his heart is already there. He’s thinking about all the things awaiting him: his wife, his son, his chance to turn off, to be himself.

Phone reception starts to die at almost exactly the moment his enthusiasm starts to wain. (Not in a negative way. In a totally understandable way. He’d just taped an episode of Ellen. Ellen is exhausting.)

So Chris Pratt is cutting out, right when he’s about to get to the good stuff, or at any rate, stuff: hunting, fishing, his admiration for the sportsman’s glories of the great Canadian outdoors.

But Chris Pratt is also just slowing down, period. He’s 35 now. Not old by human standards, but Palaeolithic by Hollywood’s.

He’s been at this a while, and he’s getting wiser, more introspective, a little more reticent to say “yes” to anything. And this is an odd thing for Chris Pratt. Because his career was built by going fast, by taking risks, by being a human pinball machine bouncing off the walls of any room he entered, never mind all the bouncing—place to place, job to job, dream to dream—he did to get there.

He ricocheted to where he is right now at a lightning pace, becoming one of the most successful and sought-after actors in Hollywood almost over night. Slowing down doesn’t just seem out of character. It seems downright insane.

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Pratt was discovered in Hawaii, where he’d gone after dropping out of school and ditching a series of dead-end jobs in America’s bleak and alienating Heartland.

He was waiting tables at a Bubba Gump Shrimp, delivering Fisherman’s Catch platters with an alarming amount of charm—so much so he got “noticed,” as they say in Hollywood origin stories, by the film director Rae Dawn Chong (Tommy Chong’s daughter, if you’re into weird trivia like that). She cast him in her upcoming horror flick on the spot. He was in LA two days later.

The movie bombed (shocker), but Pratt kept acting. It didn’t take long for him to land a regular gig on a new series, Everwood, which would air for four seasons on The WB.

Because his career was built by going fast, by taking risks, by being a human pinball bouncing off the walls of any room he entered

There are a couple of old interviews from that time kicking around the Internet, if you look for them. (“Goddamn, everything lives forever now,” he says when I tell him this. “You have to be so careful. Oh well, or just not care.”) It’s worth it, because Young Chris Pratt is a lot like Old Chris Pratt. It’s a textbook lesson in foreshadowing.

Young Chris Pratt has a great jawline. It’s square and chiseled, unobscured by even a hint of excess weight or unkempt stubble. It’s very much unlike his jawline for most of his career. Which is to say, it’s very much like his jawline today, only set off by a mop of unreasonably shaggy blond hair and too-long sideburns. He looks like a high school football player. Or maybe lacrosse.

Then, of course, you notice how charming he is, how confident, how totally excited he is just to be sitting in front of the intern that got sent to talk to this guy she’d never heard of (though you can hear her, laughing on the other side of the camera, charmed by Young Chris Pratt because, honestly, the guy is plain old charming no matter what age you catch him at).

He tells some self-deprecating jokes. He does a bad Michael Jackson impression. He hams it up, and lays down some Young Person wisdom: “I want to never take life too seriously. And I want to always have fun. And I want to always make decisions that allow me to do that. I want to be a free spirit.”

Right.