As one of America’s highest grossing actors, many people expect Chris Pratt to fall into the all-too-typical Hollywood stereotype marked by broken marriages, excessive materialism and just a touch of narcissism to polish it off.
But Pratt has continued to pave a different way for himself and his family by crediting God for his accomplishments and blessings rather than reveling in his own red carpet glory.
He and his first wife, Anna Faris, first went public with their faith in 2012 when their son Jack was born prematurely with medical complications that put him into a coma.
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“It restored my faith in God, not that it needed to be restored, but it really redefined it,” said Pratt.
Pratt also refuses to forget his humble roots, which consisted of going door to door selling coupons for oil changes and spa packages.
“That’s why I believe in God and the divine. I feel like it was perfectly planned,” he said in a recent interview with Vanity Fair.
In the same interview, the Passengers star opened up about the unconventional path that originally led him to faith in Christ. At around 20 years old, Pratt was living on a Maui beach with friends, working at Bubba Gump Shrimp and enjoying the free-spirited party life filled with alcohol and fornication.
That’s when one random encounter at a grocery store changed everything:
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.
Vanity Fair referred to Pratt’s story as “strange” and “so distant from what we expect of a movie star, especially of the clever, slapdash, wise-guy variety.”
But thankfully, Pratt isn’t too concerned about perceptions when it comes to his relationship with God and spreading the gospel.
“In that moment, he yielded,” the article reads. “His path has been clear ever since.”
