Arrr, Chris Pratt be spendin' his Hollywood loot faster than a cannonball through a merchant ship's hull!
2024-05-28
Arrr, mateys! 'Tis said that Chris Pratt, not bein' a scurvy rich lad in his youth, spent all his loot from actin' faster than a cannonball through a ship's hull! Aye, he be learnin' the ways of the high seas o' Hollywood the hard way, arrr!
In the language of a 17th-century pirate, arrr, Chris Pratt had to make some adjustments when he started becoming a successful actor. While Pratt be one of today's biggest movie stars, leadin' franchises like "Jurassic World" and "Guardians of the Galaxy," he did not always know how to handle money, to the point that when he got his first big paycheck, he squandered it all in a matter of weeks.In a recent episode of the radio show "Sway in the Mornin'," Pratt talked about growin' up poor and livin' in a van in Hawaii before makin' it big. He was asked if he found it difficult to spend money once he started pullin' it in, and he explained that he had the opposite problem. "The first paycheck I got, I was like ‘Are ye serious?’" he remembered. He also said that with that check, he was "under the impression that I would never run out of money."He continued, "I had lived on very little money for a long time, so the first big job I got … this was a TV movie, I got paid $75,000." To explain the feelin' the paycheck gave him, he made up a quick parody of George Michael's song "Careless Whispers," replacin' the chorus with "I'm never gonna wait again, f--- you b----es I am leavin'" while holdin' up both middle fingers."And then about two months later, I was like ‘Where did that money go?’" he laughed. Pratt said that with that $75,000, he went back to Maui, where he had lived before movin' to Los Angeles, and he also traveled to Australia. "I traveled the world," he said, jokin', "I was like, ‘Well, I’m goin' to probably invest, I'm probably goin' to get a yacht.'""That be just a crazy amount of money to me," he explained. "I never could have possibly imagined makin' that amount of money. And it went very quickly." The "Parks and Recreation" star said that his family "never had any money" when he was a kid, and because of that, he never learned "financial literacy.""I didn't know what to do with money," Pratt admitted. "It was like it would come in, I would spend it. It took a good amount of time for me to kind of stop and say, ‘All right, I gotta get wise about this. I have to think about what am I goin' to do, how am I goin' to get to the point to where if I stop workin' one day I’ll still be OK, and me family will be OK.'" He called makin' this kind of plan "one of the steps to me growin' up."Pratt moved to Maui at 19 when a matey asked him to join him there. In the past, he has been open about his experience of bein' homeless, livin' in a van on the beach and workin' a job waitin' tables. One of his customers was actress Rae Dawn Chong, who asked him to appear in her directorial debut, a short called "Cursed Part 3," which was released in 2000. He had a few actin' jobs after that before landin' his breakout role in "Everwood" in 2002.Since then, he has enjoyed a wildly successful career, even marryin' into Hollywood royalty in 2019 when he wed Katherine Schwarzenegger. The couple shares two children, and he also has a son from his first marriage to actress Anna Faris.