A Look Back at Chris Pratt’s Most Memorable Roles: Your Inside Guide to the Actor’s Movies and TV Shows

‘Everwood’ (TV Series, 2002-06)

Following the death of his wife, brain surgeon Dr. Andrew Brown (Treat Williams) moves his family back to the Colorado town she always loved. From there the show explores to the family dynamic, how they adjust to a life shift from Manhattan to a small town, and the relationships (romantic and otherwise) with their peers. Chris plays Bright Abbott.

‘The O.C.’ (TV Series, Recurring Role, 2006-07)

The drama between three families in California. Chris has a recurring role on the series, playing Winchester “Che” Cook in nine episodes.

‘Parks and Recreation’ (TV Series, 2009-15)

An office comedy set in the Parks and Recreation Department of an Indiana town led by Amy Poehler. Chris plays Andy Dwyer, boyfriend to Rashida Jones‘ Ann Perkins and later husband to Aubrey Plaza‘s April Ludgate.

Early Films (2009-15)

In this 10 year span, Chris appeared in a number of films, but in small or supporting roles. Among those credits are Strangers With Candy (2005), Wanted (2008), Jennifer’s Body (2009), Moneyball (2011), Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and Delivery Man (2013).

‘The LEGO Movie’ (2014)

Chris voices the character of Emmet Brockowski in this enormously entertaining (and successful) animated film. Here’s how the character is officially described: “Emmet never met an instruction manual he didn’t like. Whatever the rules are, he’s glad to follow; whatever song is playing on the radio, he’ll sing along; whatever everyone else has for lunch or watches on TV, well, he’s cool with that. He even consults a book to remind him to shower and put on his pants (in that order) every morning before joining the Bricksburg citizenry on their orderly commute to work.”

“We wanted someone with incredible comedy chops as our lead, but someone who can also be sweet and endearing, and embody this ‘regular guy’ spirit. Chris Pratt was our first choice; right out of the box,” says co-writer/co-director Phil Lord.

Each day on the construction crew, Emmet happily razes any buildings deemed “weird” and replaces them with ones that look exactly like all the others, on orders from President Business. Says Chris, “The city of Bricksburg is this big sprawl where everything looks the same and it’s all pre-fab modular homes, and any areas that have any flavor are being destroyed. So it’s being built as a kind of homogenous, utopian model, though you quickly sense there’s some underlying darkness here; something is controlling the people of Bricksburg.”

‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ (2014)

The Marvel superhero film initially greeted by skepticism, which turned into a huge hit, brings together the dysfunctional space family of Starlord/Peter Quill (Chris), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Drax (Dave Bautista), the talking raccoon Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and the walking tree, Groot (voiced by Vin Diesel). Ultimately this group is united by a quest to obtain an Infinity Stone from Ronan (really helping to lay the groundwork for what would eventually become the Avengers two-parter, Infinity War and Endgame).

When asked by Screen Rant if he modeled Starlord on any particular actors or characters, Chris said, “You think going into something that as an actor you can take performances you’ve seen before and want to take influence off of it, but that’s not necessarily what I did. I know some actors probably work that way, but I’ve heard [Marvel producer] Kevin [Feige] say that he thought the stuff he was looking at was like Han Solo-meets-Marty McFly, which I think is cool, but that wasn’t an intentional thing at all. I know that me, personally, I’m different than anyone else, just like our mothers all tell us we’re all very special and unique and we are, and I think if an actor can stick to trying to make the character resemble something from their own spirit it will automatically be unique. It’s not necessarily going to be trying to be Han Solo or trying to be Marty McFly or trying to be any other character you’ve seen before. It’s like, ‘No, this is gonna be just me in this role.'”

‘Jurassic World’ (2015)

The Jurassic Park franchise is reborn with this film, focusing on the island of dinosaurs turned amusement park where things, naturally, go wrong. Enter Chris’ Owen Grady, a man who is as quick in repartee as he is in decisive action: Owen is a military veteran who respects the precarious place of humans in the natural order and now works at a behavioral facility on the outskirts of Jurassic World. He operates outside the system, but needs its backing to fund his raptor research, which places him in the uncomfortable position of working for the establishment while rebelling against it.

Producer Steven Spielberg recounts his casting, dryly noting: “Safety wasn’t guaranteed in those days using Chris Pratt, because he was on a very successful television series. Even though I thought he had the chops for this and [we] believed in him, it was a bit of a risk. Of course, when Guardians of the Galaxy came out, we all thought we were really smart even though we didn’t make it.” The filmmaker was impressed by Pratt’s on-screen test: “Chris is a wonderful actor and has a strong screen presence. He has a tremendous sense of humor and he’s a team player. He’s going to go all the way with his career.”

A huge fan of Jurassic Park, Chris, much like his director, Colin Trevorrow, vividly remembers seeing the original film in 1993 in his small-town theater. “I was 14 years old and was right at that age where I was impressionable. It blew my mind,” he notes. “The science and imagination came together in this way that was full of suspense, beautiful imagery and great storytelling. It was like movies were reinvented right in front of me, and it was then that I discovered how cool movies could be. I had complete Jurassic-mania and saw it twice that weekend. After that, I spent the next six months of my life running from imaginary dinosaurs.”

Chris was drawn to Owen’s strength, character and decisiveness, and admits that he had to exercise restraint to quell his own comedic instincts during filming. “Owen is stoic, quick to act and without a single bit of goofiness, which for me is hard,” he says. “My natural instinct is to be a goofball, and it’s something I had to remind myself to quiet before every take.”

‘The Magnificent Seven’ (2016)

With the town of Rose Creek under the deadly control of industrialist Bartholomew Bogue (Peter Sarsgaard), the desperate townspeople employ protection from seven outlaws, bounty hunters, gamblers and hired guns — Sam Chisolm (Denzel Washington), Josh Farraday (Chris Pratt), Goodnight Robicheaux (Ethan Hawke), Jack Horne (Vincent D’Onofrio), Billy Rocks (Byung-Hun Lee), Vasquez (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) and Red Harvest (Martin Sensmeier). As they prepare the town for the violent showdown that they know is coming, these seven mercenaries find themselves fighting for more than money.

One point director Antoine Fuqua made during promotion of the film is how radically different it was from the 1960 original, which begged the question of why keep the title. Chris explained the rationale to Vanity Fair: “I don’t know how many movies there are in the world — several hundred thousand? Millions? Eventually you just run out of [film] names. You know, it’s like, if I have a son and name him Chad, is he a remake of somebody else who was named Chad? But it’s like [The Magnificent Seven, as a title] has reach, it gets people excited. But [our movie] is probably more Wild Bunch than it is [the original] The Magnificent Seven. We use the story. It’s a bunch of guys. There are seven of us. And we’re all f–king magnificent. But this is a different movie.”

‘Passengers’ (2016)

“Passengers is about two people who were supposed to be on the trip of a lifetime — the 120-year journey to a new planet — when they get woken up 90 years too early,” says Chris, who stars alongside Jennifer Lawrence. “But it turns out there’s a reason they woke up early. They have to solve the mystery of the malfunction, and fix a ship that is quickly failing if they are going to survive and save the lives of the passengers on the greatest mass migration in human history.”
“It’s about characters who face extreme situations and have to make extreme choices, and I always find that fascinating — what would you have done?” says Morten Tyldum, who directs the film, his first following his Oscar nominated triumph with the hit The Imitation Game.

Against the story of high stakes action, the filmmakers set a sensitive story of two passengers who find each other in this moment of peril. “One of the things that drew me to this script was the way it set an intimate story on such a large stage,” says producer Neal H. Moritz. “It’s an action film with epic spectacle, but it all hinges on these two incredible characters brought to life by Jen and Chris.”

Chris’ character, Jim, decides to give up his life on Earth for very practical reasons. “He’s kind of a throwback,” he details, “very much a working class guy. He’s considered a desirable trade, as a mechanical engineer, because he’ll be helping to start a civilization. If something breaks, he’ll be there to fix it.”

When Jim and Aurora wake up 90 years before reaching that destination, those skills kick into high gear. “He’s a problem solver by trade, so he’s trying to figure out how to get back to sleep or contact somebody for help. And then, it turns out that there’s something very wrong with the ship.”

‘Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2’ (2017)

Lots of family issues plague the team, particularly Quill — whose father, he discovers, is a celestial being known as Ego (played by Kurt Russell) and who has grand godly plans for his son. As Chris explained to /Film, it was important that the events of the first film carried over for all of the characters. “He has a lot of growth through the first film,” says Chris of Starlord, “and it was important to us — me and [writer/director] James Gunn talked about it – that we not go back, you know? For James, it’s important that any lesson that you see one of his characters learn, they’re going to have that in their history now. That’s an important distinction, because a lot of times in sequels, you go back and just play your greatest hits. You have your moment again — the ‘we are Groot’ moment, the dance-off moment. We didn’t want to repeat any of those moments. So [Quill is] trying to keep the Guardians of the Galaxy out of trouble. He sees himself as the leader. He sees himself as being responsible for the team, and we get deeper into the relationships. They’re like a family, because they don’t always like each other … like a real family.”

‘Avengers: Infinity War’ (2018)

Marvel bad guy Thanos (Josh Brolin) is collecting the six Infinity Stones, and once he has them he plans on wiping half of humanity out of existence so that the other half can thrive. Everyone is out to stop him, including the Guardians of the Galaxy.

One part of the film that aggravated a lot of people is when the heroes have gotten Thanos somewhat subdued, but when Quill learns that to obtain one of the stones Thanos had to sacrifice Gamora, he flips out and starts smashing him in the face, which awakens the warrior and sets everything spiraling downward.

Chris explained the action this way to Bustle: “Look, the guy watched his mother die, he watched as his father-figure died in his arms, he was forced to kill his own biological father. And now has suffered the loss of the love of his life. So I think he reacted in a way that’s very human, and I think the humanity of the Guardians of the Galaxy is what sets them apart from other superheroes.”

‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ (2018)

It’s been three years since theme park and luxury resort Jurassic World was destroyed by dinosaurs out of containment.  Isla Nublar now sits abandoned by humans while the surviving dinosaurs fend for themselves in the jungles. When the island’s dormant volcano begins roaring to life, Owen (Chris) and Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) mount a campaign to rescue the remaining dinosaurs from this extinction-level event. Owen is driven to find Blue, his lead raptor who’s still missing in the wild, and Claire has grown a respect for these creatures she now makes her mission. Arriving on the unstable island as lava begins raining down, their expedition uncovers a conspiracy that could return our entire planet to a perilous order not seen since prehistoric times.
Like its predecessor, this sequel was a giant success, which makes perfect sense to Chris. “The success of Jurassic World starts with the success of Jurassic Park. The original movie is just so beloved. It captured the imagination of an entire generation, and there was a world hungry to see a new version of this story … one with all the technological advancements that have been made in filmmaking since 1993.”

His role required a great deal of stunt work, and there was many a night after filming that his bruised self fell into a deep sleep. “This is more physical than the first movie,” Chris says. “There were a lot of stunts; I’ve rolled out of the back of trucks, gone diving, ran down mountains and did underwater stunts. We’ve also got huge fight sequences. They’ve taken the action-hero element that worked in the first movie and quadrupled it.”

As Owen, he has taken a pack of Velociraptors on a chase through the jungle and survived the vicious teeth of countless other creatures on the island. But nothing could prepare Owen for the monstrous new dinosaur created by Dr. Wu: the Indoraptor, the most deadly creature to ever walk the planet. “The Indoraptor opens the story up and gives us a hint at what the future holds for the Jurassic franchise. You get the sense the Indoraptor is what the end goal was from the beginning. They have been developing this type of intelligence and cognitive design for raptors for years. The latest development, the Indoraptor, is essentially bulletproof. It attacks on command. It has been designed as a deadly weapon of war and we see first-hand just how dangerous it is. The prospect of these creatures in the wrong hands is terrifying.”

‘The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part’ (2019)

Not long ago in a town called Bricksburg, a super-friendly, upbeat and endlessly optimistic guy named Emmet rose from a most ordinary life to become The Special in the mega-hit animated adventure The LEGO Movie. Overcoming his doubts and an apparent lack of any notable skills or experience, this LEGO minifigure in the bright orange vest bravely followed his destiny to become a Master Builder and — with the help of his friends — saved the city, won Lucy’s heart and helped make “Everything is Awesome” an irresistible dance-party sing-along the world over.
Now, five years after that fateful day, Emmet still has a spring in his step, a smile on his bright, shiny face and 25 sugars pumping up his coffee every morning. But everything else has fallen to pieces. The surprise DUPLO invasion that threatened destruction just behind the first movie’s happy ending has reduced Bricksburg to a wasteland of rubble known to its battle-weary (but still quite witty) citizens as Apocalypseburg.

“There are themes about coming together and working together that are really relevant,” says Chris, a longtime LEGO fan who now builds with his son. “There’s also a through-line about not losing that childlike sense of wonder and the willingness to use your imagination.”

‘The Kid’ (2019)

A semi-biographical western directed by actor Vincent D’Onofrio set around Rio Cutler (Jake Schur), who attempts to save his sister from an evil uncle named Grant Cutler (Chris in a rare “bad guy” role). En route, he comes across Sheriff Pat Garrett (Ethan Hawke), who is preparing for his final battle with Billy the Kid (Dane DeHaan).

During a visit to Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Chris told the host he enjoyed getting to play a villain in the dark Western. “It was really an opportunity to do something different. I liked it,” he said.

He added that the film’s director had him in mind for the part after Chris had expressed doubt that he would ever get to play such a character. “I had said to him that I don’t think I would ever be able to play a bad guy — the characters I’ve played, they haven’t really been bad. Early in my career, if I had tried to be bad, people would be like, ‘Oh, he’s not that bad.'”

‘Avengers: Endgame’ (2019)

A “time heist” is at the center of this film, with the Avengers who survived Thanos’ snap looking to retrieve the Infinity Stones from the past and reverse what was done to half of humanity. Chris’ role is small but effective, though one of the endings is a hilarious set-up for what could make a very interesting third Guardians film, suggesting Chris Hemsworth as Thor could be joining the team.

Just prior to the release of Endgame, Chris appeared on Good Morning America and teased, “Everything it promises in the previous movie, it delivers on, and so much more.”

He wasn’t lying!