Chris Pratt finds his clown and other magnificent thoughts

Last week, on the opening day of the terrifying cine-blob known as the Toronto International Film Festival, 37-year-old Minnesota native Chris Pratt (Parks and Recreation, Guardians of the Galaxy, Jurassic World, not to mention Moneyball and Zero Dark Thirty) talked to me about all the jerk-boyfriend roles played en route to movie stardom, and what making his first Western was like.
He’s a nice guy with a firm handshake. We met at the Four Seasons, a couple of hours before the first Toronto festival media and industry screening of director Antoine Fuqua’s remake of The Magnificent Seven” First-wave reviews are chilly, but Pratt’s career will be fine, thanks.
The movie stars Denzel Washington and, second-billed, Pratt as the gambler, shootist and scoundrel Josh Farraday. He’s enlisted, for a fee, to clean up the dirty town in the grip of a bad rich man played by Peter Saarsgard.
Pratt wasn’t into Westerns growing up; he’d watch them on TV, semi-to-moderately reluctantly, with his father. Then, years later, there he was in London, shooting Guardians of the Galaxy, and the 1940 William Wyler film The Westerner with Gary Cooper and Walter Brennan came on.
“I loved it. I couldn’t believe how much I loved it,” he said. “That was the first movie I saw that really drew me into Westerns.” Cooper’s rugged minimalism set the bait. Galaxy director James Gunn, a huge Western fan, provided a long list of must-sees for Pratt’s continuing education, High Noon, Rio Bravo and The Wild Bunch among them.
And then, Pratt said, “I realised how much I wanted to do one.”
His laconic but wisecracking role in The Magnificent Seven invites a certain amount of comedy in between killings. Director Fuqua, he said, “definitely reined me in. He’d never over-explain things, but he’d come over and say just a couple of words to keep me in line: ‘Remember, this guy is dangerous.’ It’s more in my natural instincts to do something comedic, but I try to remember there are real moments at stake, real drama, real emotions. All I’m trying to do is make whatever choice I make real. Most of the time I’m completely wrong, but that’s why I try different things. And that allows a director to find the right tone in the edit.”
Seven TV seasons on the high-quality medium-hit Parks and Recreation provided droll, steady training for all sorts of later work, Pratt said. Plus it meant a seminormal actor’s life. “Being home, in LA, working seven minutes from my house nine months out of the year ... that was just fantastic. The gig kept me home, and that was really cool, the practicality of it. I loved all the friendships I made, lifelong friends.”
Pratt thought a second, and then continued: “That show was, for me, the chance to do something really character-y. I’d been going out for all the jerk-boyfriend roles before that, the guys the leading guys beat up at the end of the movie.” With Parks and Recreation, he said, “I got to find my clown. A really important thing.” Then he went about figuring out how, and to what degree, to retain that clown within action-hero roles in massively successful blockbusters beginning with Guardians of the Galaxy, the sequel to which is forthcoming.
Did it get to be a drag, I wondered, playing all those guys the audience was supposed to dislike for all those years?
It would have been, he said, laughing, “if I didn’t have an impenetrable ego.” —Chicago Tribune/TNS