Chris Pratt Cooks

Chris Pratt is on the cover of this month's Vanity Fair. Here's what he had to say:

On cooking for the interviewer with mea from Whole Foods:
“I could tell you this is the boar I shot, and who would know, but, dude, I’m not gonna lie. This is not that boar, but this boar stands for that boar.”

On what he likes to cook:
“I can make three things. Meat. Omelets. Fajitas. This here I’m making is a wild-boar taco. I got the recipe from my brother-in-law, because that guy knows everything.”

On his high school football days:
“I was a great football player. Don’t say I said that. But, dude, I was a great football player. I was a fullback and an inside linebacker. I never had the speed to play college. But I loved it. I don’t think anything will ever take its place. The competition, the team. You get a little bit of that in acting. You get it with action films. You have to train, be in shape. I think I learned more about how to handle myself as an actor playing sports than I ever did in theater.”

On his big brother, known as Cully:
“He was hands down the best big brother anyone could ask for, super-supportive and always helped me, and loved me, and took care of me. We spent our entire childhood, eight hours a day, wrestling. One Christmas, he was in a play, a musical, and sang, and it knocked everyone’s socks off. My mom was crying. And I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ ”

On whether or not his father, who died in 2014, got to enjoy Pratt's success:
“Some of it. He watched a lot of TV in his final years. That’s pretty much all he did, just sat in front of a TV. So, yeah, I think it made him proud, and it was cool that I got to find some way to connect with him, because he was a hard man to connect with.”

On the event that changed his life when he was 19:
“I was sitting outside a grocery store—we’d convinced someone to go in and buy us beer. This is Maui. And a guy named Henry came up and recognized something in me that needed to be saved. He asked what I was doing that night, and I was honest. I said, ‘My friend’s inside buying me alcohol.’ ‘You going to go party?’ he asked. ‘Yeah.’ ‘Drink and do drugs? Meet girls, fornication?’ I was like, ‘I hope so.’ I was charmed by this guy, don’t know why. He was an Asian dude, maybe Hawaiian, in his 40s. It should’ve made me nervous but didn’t. I said, ‘Why are you asking?’ He said, ‘Jesus told me to talk to you . . .’ At that moment I was like, I think I have to go with this guy. He took me to church. Over the next few days I surprised my friends by declaring that I was going to change my life.”

On his look when he first came to Hollywood:
“I looked exactly like Heath Ledger. I had long blond hair, still bleached out, Hawaiian . . . That’s what people were always saying: Man, you look just like Heath Ledger. Then I saw Heath Ledger on the cover of Vanity Fair, and I thought, Hey, I do look just like that guy.”

On getting Guardians of the Galaxy:
“Guardians had come around, and I passed. James Gunn [the director] passed on me, too. When they announced it, I looked it up and saw a list of the top 20 dudes in Hollywood who might play Peter Quill. I was not on that list. I did not want to go in and embarrass myself. My agent said, ‘Guardians is everything you’ve been saying you want to do.’ I said, ‘Fuck, you’re right.’ But I’m going to go in there and do exactly what I mean by action comedy. My brand of stuff. Brash. Honest. I played the room. Jim Gunn, the way he tells it is like this: ‘Who do we have next? Chris Pratt? What the fuck? I said we weren’t going to audition the chubby guy from Parks and Rec.’ ‘Well, he’s already here.’ They’d tested probably 10 people, spent a lot of money, and James wasn’t convinced on anyone yet. When I finished [my scene], he said, ‘Do you have any questions?’ I was like, ‘Are you fuckin’ crazy? Tell me everything.’ I gave him my Peter Quill version of an answer. Once you get smart about auditioning, you learn to audition before they say ‘Action.’ You walk into the room as the character. You let them think the person you are is close to the character they want. You make them think you already are that guy. Gunn was like, ‘Damn, this is it.’ ”

Read the full interview at Vanity Fair.