Chris Pratt Video Interview On ‘Moneyball,’ Brad Pitt

Originally, I just auditioned for the role, it was a lot of people auditioning for it. The audition went well, except for they told me I was just too fat [laughs], which is a bit of a shot to the ego. I took the next few months to just really start slimming down. I kind of did it on spec – they didn't really promise me anything – but I thought if that was the one thing that was holding me back, that hopefully they wouldn't cast anyone else, and I just hit the gym really hard and dieted and and did a bunch of working out and kind of lost a bunch of weight and luckily they hadn't cast anyone by the time I'd lost the weight and that's how I got the role.

[Pointing to a picture of Brad Pitt] Working with this guy right here? This guy? Brad Pitt? Pretty awesome. I won't say we're best friends, but we are co-workers so, pretty close. No, it was awesome, man. He's quite possibly the biggest movie star in the world and every time he walks into the room you can just feel everybody's energy kind of turn towards him. He handles it with class. He's really down to earth and grounded and at the end of the day he's just a guy showing up to go to work like everybody else there. It was really, really surreal. It's definitely a milestone in a person's career to work with someone like Brad Pitt.

I think the part of this process that stands out for me, there are a number of things that really stand out, but one thing I can speak about is just being part of a team. You know, putting on a Major League uniform, hanging out with a bunch of baseball players in the locker room, or on the lot at Sony we would go to Starbucks and just kind of sit there and everybody treated us like a professional baseball team. It was pretty cool and all the players, aside from myself, have professional experience. They cast real baseball players in these roles. They did that in order to stay really authentic to the sport and make the baseball portion of the movie look very real and you got guys that are throwing 90 mile an hour pitches and fielding real grounders coming off of hot bats. I mean, the baseball stuff in this movie is real baseball being played, so to be part of that team for weeks on end felt really good. I realized I really missed that because, you know, I played sports growing up as a kid. It was something I'd missed, so it was nice. It was fun to hang out with just the dudes, tell stories and, I'm married so I would just sit back, but to have the single guys whistling at girls and, I don't know, it was just a lot of fun.

Yeah, this role was a bit of a departure for me in terms of what I've been doing or what people have seen me do. It's 'Parks and Recreation,' if people recognize me on the streets it's usually from 'Parks and Recreation.' That's more of a broad, goofy, comedic role. This is something more serious, really grounded. It was Bennett Miller, the director's approach was to make this very realistic, so everything is totally grounded and real. It was a lot of fun. It's something that, it was a challenge – and I had a lot of fun doing it. It's certainly much different than doing comedy. But there are some comedic beats in this movie, which is a very artistic, dramatic movie, but it has really, really good moments that'll make you laugh out loud and I am hopefully a part of some of those moments. It was a little different, but I was happy to do it. I'd love to do more things like this.