In the decade since first playing Peter Quill/Star-Lord in “Guardians of the Galaxy” Chris Pratt, with his exuberant comic physicality, morphed from a likable supporting player to Hollywood’s A-list successor to Harrison Ford.
This week’s “Guardians 3” now matches his other, equally popular “Jurassic World” trilogy as the velociraptor-taming Owen Grady.
Star-Lord, the half-human leader of a pack of quirkily adorable misfits has been dubbed “A blissed-out space cowboy.” Last week’s virtual global press conference for “Vol. 3” emphasized that this is a conclusion, the bye-bye-bye of “Guardians.” But as any Marvel follower knows, that changes whenever creator-writer-director James Gunn gets a green light for “Vol. 4.”
What’s clear in “3” is Star-Lord’s not happy. “He’s definitely lost,” Pratt, 43, said. “Quill is a guy who needs to learn how to swim. He has been hopping from lily pad to lily pad, woman to woman. In the beginning he was running from the death of his mother and pretended to be this character based on these pop culture icons.
“But it was kind of B.S. He found himself with the Guardians, searching for his father, searching for who he is – and he found it in his relationship with Gamora (Zoe Saldana). But he lost it. None of these people are the real him and he’s lost.”
Pratt knows about the responsibility that comes being Number 1 on the call sheet. On his last day filming there were things to do.
“I don’t know if they wanted me to say something; they weren’t going to stop me,” he recalled. “I guess the thing you want to avoid is regret, looking back and say, Why did I just let that go by without enjoying every moment? Why didn’t I savor that?
“I knew all that going into it. I’ll never have that thought, ‘I wasn’t present to it.’ I was present. It still felt like a whirlwind. Feelings I was writing down in the back of my mind about the experience sounds trite — it was gratitude, being grateful.
“I wanted to be the guy who reminds people how far we’ve come.
So I read some reviews from people who said, ‘Guardians was going to be the first big Marvel flop.’
“I knew how important it was to be present in that moment. I have had the experience of things that have come and gone, like after seven years ‘Parks and Recreation.’ How it felt like the last day of school before summer: Will I ever see these people again?
“It’s an emotional feeling and having gone through that, I made sure I was checking with everybody.”
“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3” opens Friday