The 44-year-old actor believes there are “things to mine” when it comes to his relationship with his late father, who died in 2014.
Chris Pratt is opening up about how how his “complicated” relationship with his father shapes his roles.
While appearing on SiriusXM’s Sway in the Morning it was noted that Pratt tends to find roles that have interesting relationships between fathers and sons, leaving the crew wondering if that was a coincidence or not.
The 44-year-old said he never thought about it, but admitted he tends to “gravitate towards” roles like MCU’s Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy, and now Garfield in The Garfield Movie, which explores Garfield being abandoned by his father.
“I hadn’t really thought about that,” he said. “But, yeah my own relationship with my dad was fairly complicated, so there’s things to mine there. Maybe it’s not a coincidence.”
He further explained that it’s important for any comedy to have “an emotional through line, in order for there to be structure of an actual movie”.
“Otherwise, you kind of get tired of these same hackneyed jokes over and over again,” he said. “If it’s not actually a drama, should you strip away all the jokes and the spectacle, you need an actual dramatic through line.”
Even in animated children’s comedies, there is a serious theme. Pratt added, “This happens to be hinged on Garfield feeling abandonment with his father, and so that’s, yeah. That’s a deep feeling I think a lot of people could relate to.”
“Man, Garfield just got real all of a sudden,” the host responded, with Pratt joking The Garfield Movie is “the most dramatic interpretation of a feline.”
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Pratt’s father Daniel died of multiple sclerosis in 2014. He previously told British GQ in 2016 about the loss of his father, admitting that he faced some regret over their relationship.
“There are wounds that are never going to be totally healed. It would probably make for a better story if it was some emotional thing that I hadn’t dealt with,” he said at the time. “When we face the death of a parent, you sometimes feel regret that you didn’t fully embrace what you had.”
In 2015, he also said his father’s MS diagnosis was tough on the family.
“He was pretty ornery to begin with and so that just made him more ornery,” he said. “When he lost his ability to walk he gave up on life. Men of his ilk are defined by their ability to provide physically for their family and when that’s taken away, that was a joke to him.”
The Garfield Movie is out now in theaters.
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