“I DON’T know how I’d react if I found I had 500 kids,” Pratt says.
LOS ANGELES—“Oh my gosh, I certainly could have made a job of donating sperm when I was a teenager. I’d be a millionaire,” said Chris Pratt with a laugh when asked about sperm donation, a topic in his new film, “Delivery Man.” In writer-director Ken Scott’s remake of his Canadian hit, “Starbuck,” Chris plays the best friend of Vince Vaughn, whose character learns he has fathered 533 children through his anonymous donations to a fertility clinic many years ago.
“I don’t know how I’d react if I found I had 500 kids,” added Chris, who is Andy Dwyer in the TV series, “Parks and Recreation” and fast rising in the movie arena. He is Peter Quill/Star-Lord (he had to buff up for the role) in “Guardians of the Galaxy.” He is in Spike Jonze’s acclaimed “Her” and is reportedly in talks to star in “Jurassic World.” “I’d probably invite them all to come live with me. Yeah, Anna (Faris, his actress wife) and I.”
“Delivery Man,” based on a true story of a sperm donor, features Vince’s David Wozniak, a slacker who faces a lawsuit from 142 of his 500-plus children to force him to reveal his identity. “I do have friends like David Wozniak in my real life,” Chris remarked. “Not that they have sired 500 children but they really don’t have their s**t together. They can’t hold down a job and everyone around them thinks that they’re losers. There are people like that in my life whom I know. And wow, thinking of one particular person, I think I’d tell him to lay low and don’t do anything but hopefully, he’d have to make his own decision.”
CHRIS Pratt (left) and Vince Vaughn star in “Delivery Man.”
Chris has a one-year-old son with Anna, whom he married in Bali in 2009. “It definitely takes a village to raise a child,” he said. “We are fortunate that my in-laws are a big part of my son’s life. Anna’s mom and dad are down to help us a lot.”
With a laugh, he admitted, “Before we had a kid, we spent just as much time drinking and waking up with a hangover. That was hard as well but now we traded it out. Now, instead of going out until 2 in the morning, we wake up and give the kid a bottle. The bottle’s going in the kid’s mouth, not ours.”
Surprised
Chris is surprised but grateful about the breaks coming his way. He was stunned when Spike Jonze called him to join Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson and Amy Adams in “Her.” “The way I got ‘Her’ was very surreal,” said the 34-year-old Minnesota native. “I got a call on my cell phone from Spike Jonze. He was like, ‘Hey Chris, it’s Spike Jonze.’ I was like, ‘Why are you calling me?’ He said he had this role for me in this movie and he’d like me to be part of it. It’s a good role. I felt it was an opportunity to work with Spike. That was how it happened. When Spike calls you and asks you to be in a movie, you say yes.”
In a separate interview, Vince talked about his character, David, ending up being like a guardian angel to hundreds of his offspring. While he shied from harping about his own good deeds, the actor acknowledged that he’s had his own guardian angels and that gaining a better perspective as he matures has helped him become more understanding of the people he encounters.
VAUGHN says it’s important to let your kids know that you love them.
“I’m not someone to say, ‘I’ve done this and this and this,’” he declared. “But yes, I’ve been helped myself as well. It’s important in life that as you get older and you mature, you start realizing that sometimes people are hurting more than you realize. You don’t know what’s going on with them in their lives. As you get older, you start to approach people more like, ‘Maybe this person is hurting?’ When you are younger, you are more like, ‘God, that guy is just an a******.’ As you get older, you start to realize that you don’t know what’s going on in someone’s life. You become a little more patient and supportive.”
Big question
What if he wakes up one day and finds that he’s daddy to hundreds of kids? “That’s a big question,” replied Vince, who has two children, Locklyn and Vernon, with wife, Kyla. “You would want to try to find a way to let those kids know that they’re loved or that you’re thinking of them. That would be important to do. But thankfully, I didn’t earn my way that way when I was younger. So don’t expect me to be in that situation.”
With sperm donation being the film’s subject matter, the “Delivery Man” set was full of risqué jokes, according to Vince. “The gentleman who plays my father said of my character, ‘El Masterbator.’ There definitely was a lot of joking around.”
Steady career
At 43, Vince has a steady career. Asked about Hollywood appearing to be less hospitable to actresses once they were in their 40s and if he himself was worried about aging, Vince answered, “It is a lot easier for guys, unfortunately. I think it’s much harder for actresses…”
“I’ll tell you a funny story,” he volunteered. “When I first started to notice that my hair started to turn a bit gray, I thought, boy, my hair is turning a little gray. My mom is very funny. She said, ‘You can get stuff that darkens it. No one will notice.’ So she went to the store and she came home with this product, Just For Men. I said, ‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ She said, ‘It’s fantastic. No one will notice. We’ll do just a bit.’ My mom applied it on my hair. I think I left it five minutes too long. I looked like Adam Ant or Roy Orbison. Like nobody would notice? Everybody noticed! So much so that when I attended meetings, I felt embarrassed and self-conscious that I would let everyone know that I did this thing.
Not a priority
“Then I had someone who knew what he was doing fix it. Now, I don’t do it at all. I leave my hair as it is. It’s nice if you’re able to get to a place where you’re not going to chase that. There’s something great about allowing yourself to go through the stages that you’re going through. I do know the feeling when that (graying hair) first hits you. It’s less important to me. It’s not my priority.”
Vince, whose coming films include “Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues,” “Business Trip” and “Daddy’s Home,” is elated that Universal, which initially stopped the project, “Term Life,” has greenlit the project again. He will play a man hunted by the Mafia, who takes a big life insurance policy payable to his estranged daughter, to be played by Fil-Am actress Hailee Steinfeld. “Bill Paxton and Jon Voight are in the film too,” he said of the thriller to be directed by Peter Billingsley. “It’s a father-daughter thing. It’s a very interesting screenplay so I’m glad that we’re still doing it.”
(E-mail the columnist at rvnepales_5585@yahoo.com. Follow him at https://twitter.com/nepalesruben.)