Chris Pratt honed clown persona ‘his entire life’
Written by worldOneFm on July 24, 2022
Chris Pratt honed the clown character he played in Parks and Recreation his entire life as a “self-defence mechanism”.
Outside of his successful movie franchises, Guardians of the Galaxy and Jurassic World, Pratt is best known for playing the goofy and dim-witted Andy Dwyer in the TV sitcom between 2009 and 2015.
In an interview with Men’s Health magazine, Pratt explained that he had been creating the Andy-style clown persona his whole life as he wasn’t as tough as his father wanted him to be.
“He was from the old school. He was a boxer and a bouncer. He used to f**king kick the s**t out of people,” he shared. “I am a sensitive person. My dad knew that when I was a youngster, and it kind of made him dislike me. Or not dislike me but act like he disliked me – ’cause he probably grew up in a world where a guy like that could get eaten alive. And so he wanted to put calluses on me.
“Early on, I developed humour as a self-defence mechanism – I developed Andy, really. Andy on Parks and Rec was my clown that I had honed my entire life, a guy who is affable, who’s an intelligent person playing a dumb person.”
Pratt, whose father died in 2014, has continued to leverage this dumb image for a joke in his movie franchises and he admitted he uses this persona as “a tactic” to “lower people’s expectations of me”.
