Chris Pratt Reveals How He Blew His First $75,000 Paycheck: 'It Went Very Quickly'
Chris Pratt will never forget how quickly he spent his first major paycheck.
The Marvel actor and “Jurassic World” star has come a long way since his “Parks and Recreation” days on television, but he recently told SiriusXM’s Sway Calloway that his first $75,000 didn’t last long, recalling that “it went very quickly.”
“I was under the impression that I would never run out of money,” Pratt said. “The first paycheck I got, I was like, ‘Are you serious?’ ... I had lived on very little money for a long time, so the first big job I got — I remember it was called a Schedule F job, and this was a TV movie.
“I got paid $75,000,” he continued, before using George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” melody to add: “I’m never gonna wait again. Fuck you bitches, I am leaving.”
He went on, “Then about two months later I was like, ‘Where’d that money go?’”
Pratt explained that, since he “never could have possibly imagined making that amount of money,” he soon “traveled the world” and hilariously started humoring grand delusions: “I’m gonna probably invest. I’m probably gonna get a yacht.”
Pratt has previously said that he was discovered by actor Rae Dawn Chong while waiting tables for the Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. in Hawaii, where he lived in his van. After a cameo in Chong’s short film “Cursed Part 3,” Pratt truly hit it big.
The actor began appearing on the WB drama “Everwood” in 2002 and then starred in NBC’s popular “Parks and Recreation” starting in 2009. He’s since led Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” franchise and appeared in various other Marvel movies.
The father of three explained on Calloway’s show that he “never had any money growing up” and “no one ever taught me financial literacy” — but he’s tried to learn it on his own.
“It took a good amount of time for me to kind of stop and say, ‘All right, I’ve got to get wise about this,’” he said, adding that he asked himself, “How am I gonna get to the point to where, if I stop working one day, I’ll still be OK [and] my family will be OK?”
While he added that nabbing “Everwood” and being able to buy his mom a house was when he felt like he’d “made it,” the actor now earns millions per film — and said drafting a “financial literacy plan” was “one of the steps of me growing up.”