Chris Pratt had to make some adjustments when he started becoming a successful actor.
While Pratt is one of today's biggest movie stars, leading franchises like "Jurassic World" and "Guardians of the Galaxy," he did not always know how to handle money, to the point that when he got his first big paycheck, he squandered it all in a matter of weeks.
In a recent episode of the radio show "Sway in the Morning," Pratt talked about growing up poor and living in a van in Hawaii before making it big. He was asked if he found it difficult to spend money once he started pulling it in, and he explained that he had the opposite problem.
"The first paycheck I got, I was like ‘Are you serious?’" he remembered. He also said that with that check, he was "under the impression that I would never run out of money."
He continued, "I had lived on very little money for a long time, so the first big job I got … this was a TV movie, I got paid $75,000."
To explain the feeling the paycheck gave him, he made up a quick parody of George Michael's song "Careless Whispers," replacing the chorus with "I'm never gonna wait again, f--- you b----es I am leaving" while holding up both middle fingers.
"And then about two months later, I was like ‘Where did that money go?’" he laughed.
Pratt said that with that $75,000, he went back to Maui, where he had lived before moving to Los Angeles, and he also traveled to Australia.
"I traveled the world," he said, joking, "I was like, ‘Well, I’m going to probably invest, I'm probably going to get a yacht.'"
"That was just a crazy amount of money to me," he explained. "I never could have possibly imagined making that amount of money. And it went very quickly."
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The "Parks and Recreation" star said that his family "never had any money" when he was a kid, and because of that, he never learned "financial literacy."
"I didn't know what to do with money," Pratt admitted. "It was like it would come in, I would spend it. It took a good amount of time for me to kind of stop and say, ‘All right, I gotta get wise about this. I have to think about what am I going to do, how am I going to get to the point to where if I stop working one day I’ll still be OK, and my family will be OK.'"
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He called making this kind of plan "one of the steps to me growing up."
Pratt moved to Maui at 19 when a friend asked him to join him there. In the past, he has been open about his experience of being homeless, living in a van on the beach and working a job waiting tables.
One of his customers was actress Rae Dawn Chong, who asked him to appear in her directorial debut, a short called "Cursed Part 3," which was released in 2000. He had a few acting jobs after that before landing his breakout role in "Everwood" in 2002.
Since then, he has enjoyed a wildly successful career, even marrying into Hollywood royalty in 2019 when he wed Katherine Schwarzenegger. The couple shares two children, and he also has a son from his first marriage to actress Anna Faris.
