Chris Pratt Blew His First Screen Test for Guardians of the Galaxy, Was Saved by James Gunn
Chris Pratt's now closely associated with Guardians of the Galaxy, and it's almost impossible to imagine someone else playing Star-Lord. But we were this close to never seeing him play this role since he really messed up the screen test.
James Gunn 's Guardians became a hit against all odds.
They even became Gunn's against all odds, really: the famous director initially hated the idea of the movie and didn't want to take it on.
As he later admitted, he refused the offer — and then, on his way home, it clicked, and the director realized the true potential of the idea.
Gunn overtook the franchise and, with his massive experience and talent, made it successful. But Guardians did not only get their director by lucky chance — the same happened with their lead star, Chris Pratt.
For the role of Star-Lord, over 200 actors were auditioned. James Gunn couldn't settle on any of them, but when he saw Pratt's performance, he immediately fell in love.
He famously turned to casting director Sarah Finn and claimed, "This is the one!" just mere seconds into Chris' audition.
However, convincing Gunn was the easy part — the difficult part was getting Marvel on board with this lead actor choice.
And Chris made it so much harder by blowing his first screen test that he almost lost the role altogether.
In the middle of the screen test, James stopped the actor, approached him, and said, "I don't know what you're doing, but you're blowing it. This is the moment right now. You just need to stop doing whatever you're doing and just be real. Just be you."
Despite the advice, Chris couldn't concentrate. Gunn just stopped his screen test just to tell him he was blowing it — and the actor was so nervous and embarrassed that his performance actually worsened.
But James Gunn was far from ready to give up on his vision of Pratt playing Star-Lord, so he used his secret move: improvisation.
To aid Chris, the director brought out Dave Bautista who was auditioning for the role of Brax, and told the men to improvise.
This time, Gunn's plan worked out brilliantly: improv allowed both actors to relax a bit, and their talent and on-screen chemistry became apparent.
This convinced the Marvel execs to greenlight Chris Pratt for the role of Star-Lord despite his previous chokes.
Bautista, though, was next on the list: now Marvel didn't want to approve him — but as we know, James Gunn handled that, too.
In the end, having fought his battles with the execs, the director got the cast he envisioned and turned the idea he initially hated into one of the best Marvel movies ever.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter