Guardians Of The Galaxy star Chris Pratt has said he hopes his latest film makes cowboys cool to young boys, but admitted his young son would be more impressed by a Lego Batman.
Chris, who voiced Emmet in The Lego Movie, will next be seen as gambler and gunslinger Josh Faraday in the re-imagining of the Western, The Magnificent Seven, and said he wants to bring old fashioned heroes to the younger generation.
Chris, who has a four-year-old son Jack with his actress wife Anna Faris, told the Press Association: “Hopefully this movie will continue to keep cowboys cool and relevant to young boys.
“I would have to ask my son but right now a Lego Batman would be the coolest thing to him.
“To me at least, that is what I did as a kid, running around with my BB Gun, pretending to shoot stuff.”
Pratt said the chance to play a darker character opposite Denzel Washington appealed to him after a string of comedy roles, including his long-running part in Parks and Recreation, his leading-man turn in the Marvel film and his wise-cracking raptor trainer in Jurassic World.
He admitted director Antoine Fuqua had to help him overcome his impulse to play the nice guy, saying: “It’s not in my nature. Someone told me this once, ‘When you’re acting you don’t add on to yourself the things you want to create your character, you take away from yourself things to reveal, and what is left over is the character.
“I have this natural impulse to be a pleaser and a good boy and to respect authority and to try to be nice.
“I care if people think that I’m a jerk and Antoine told me that was something I had to remove from myself. He said ‘You’re mean, you’re a killer’.
“There was something that drew me to the character of someone who has taken the lives of other people, a person who is mired in the guilt of doing some pretty terrible things and lives that kind of hell-on-earth existence that comes with committing the most mortal sins.
“There was something appealing to me about that, I had never done that before. I suspected that I might have that inside me and wanted to explore it.”
:: The Magnificent Seven will be released in UK cinemas on September 23.
