Chris Pratt, Christianity and Charlie Kirk

Many people reacted differently after the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week, but the actor Chris Pratt chose to behave in a way that few, if any, of his A-list Hollywood peers would have been comfortable with. The Guardians of the Galaxy star put a short video on X showing him praying, with his eyes tightly closed, and then he directed his fans – I almost wrote “followers”, but he does have over eight million of them on the platform – to go out and do good works. With almost self-parodic seriousness, the erstwhile Star-Lord tells them to “go outside, get some sunshine, touch some grass… you’ve got time to reach out to someone in need and share this prayer with them”, before concluding, naturally enough “Amen”.

There are, of course, many Christians in Hollywood, not least actor-director Mel Gibson, whose eagerly awaited (and sure to be insane) Passion of the Christ sequel, The Resurrection of the Christ, has started filming this summer and is slated to be released in 2027. Yet Pratt is different to the Gibsons (and indeed his star, Jim Caviezels) in that he is one of the biggest stars in the entertainment industry with a well-earned reputation for being able to combine action heroics with a gift for comic timing: in other words, just like Robert Downey Jr, who went from being a well-regarded character actor with a narcotics problem to the biggest star in the industry, just because he played Iron Man.

Pratt, however, has always been open about his faith, sometimes to near-comical extremes. He posted an Instagram picture of a shining cross and exhorted his followers to prayer in language that sounded a lot like self-help – “cast down darkness, choose positivity” – and this was all because the post was his 666th. The tension between Pratt’s on-screen persona, all cocky one-liners and lazy charm, and the earnestness with which he conducts himself in matters of God would be detrimental to his career, one imagines, were it not for the fact that he has starred in some of the highest-grossing films of all time, and is, quite literally, too big to fail. If he wants to put a prayer out into the world in memory of Charlie Kirk, he is more than welcome to do so, in the eyes of studio chiefs, as long as he turns up on the Avengers: Doomsday set on time.

It is notable that Hollywood seems unsure as to how to deal with the Kirk situation. His name went conspicuously unmentioned at this year’s Emmys, although the veteran star Jamie Lee Curtis wept on the Marc Maron podcast while talking of him, saying “I disagreed with him on almost every point I ever heard him say, but I believe he was a man of faith, and I hope in that moment when he died, that he felt connected with his faith. Even though his ideas were abhorrent to me. I still believe he’s a father and a husband and a man of faith. And I hope whatever connection to God means that he felt it.” This seems to epitomize what many in the industry might feel, at least privately, but few want to be seen to be associated with a man who appeared to represent staunchly conservative values: the antithesis of La-La Land.

Pratt, however, seems to be immune to such criticism. Granted, there are always subsections of the internet and social media that bitch bitterly about him, calling him the “least likeable Chris” (the others being Pine, Evans and Hemsworth) and suggesting that he is a closet MAGA supporter. He may very well be, but Pratt is intelligent enough to know that the grief he would get for expressing his political opinions is not worth the catharsis that he would feel for coming clean about them. (He conspicuously failed to endorse Kamala Harris last year, although he also offered no support for Trump, either.)

Yet whether because his religion is the most important aspect of his life, or because he feels that it is a back way of connecting to his conservative fans, he is unafraid of expressing his faith, and Hollywood, for the time being at least, has to be comfortable with that, too. The industry may not want to “do” God, but Pratt, at least, can do exactly what he likes – as long, that is, as his films continue setting box office records.