It was one of the worst droughts in California’s history. The well, once overflowing and the source of so much good fortune, had run dry. Panic set in, followed by a sense of despair, as nothing seemed capable of replenishing the supply.
In Hollywood, there were no action heroes to be found.
Parched filmmakers tried chugging a big glass of Chris Pine. They cracked open a bottle of Gerard Butler. And during one misguided week in September 2011, as their lips cracked and their tongues swelled in their mouths, they were forced to take a putrid sip of Taylor Lautner.
But then, like an oasis in the desert, salvation appeared. It came in an unexpected form — with a bit higher a BMI than one would have thought — and from a vast, barren wasteland that had not proven fertile since before the last ice age: NBC.
Chris Pratt is here — and Hollywood may finally have the next-generation action hero it’s been searching for basically since the 1980s.
Pratt, previously best known for appearing in the sitcom “Parks and Recreation,” burst onto the A-list last summer after helping “Guardians of the Galaxy” become the third-highest-grossing release of the year.
His blockbuster-fronting ways continue with Friday’s “Jurassic World,” the long-gestating next installment in the angry-dinosaurs-eat-dumb-people franchise. Pratt plays Owen Grady, an employee at a now fully functional dino theme park. Ten years after its opening and with attendance declining, the park decides to introduce a terrifying hybrid monster. What could go wrong?
The film is reportedly predicted to bring in more than $100 million during its opening weekend, which would make it one of the summer’s biggest draws and complete Pratt’s ascent from a bit-part comedic actor to a full-blown tent-pole star.
No one saw this coming, but even early on, Pratt, 35, had that certain something.
“We see thousands of actors a year. Most of them you forget. He was one you didn’t,” says Venus Kanani, a casting director who put Pratt in his first headlining role, 2009’s little-seen comedy “Deep in the Valley.” “Chris has an intangible quality. You want to watch him, know him and hang out with him.”
Here are three more reasons why Pratt is the action star Hollywood needs right now.
This was nothing less than his destiny
Should you have any doubt that all this was meant to happen, consider one thing: He’s probably the only movie star in history whose road began at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.
It was there, at the Maui location in the late 1990s, that actress Rae Dawn Chong spotted Pratt waiting tables and cast him in her directorial debut, the misfire “Cursed Part 3.”
“He was so hot, and he was like, ‘I just came from Hawaii. I’m an artist,’ ” that film’s co-star Amy Lyndon tells The Post. “He had curly blond hair, like Christopher Atkins in the ’80s. Rae Dawn was like, ‘Yeah, I found him at a restaurant.’ ”
The budding star had studied acting at a community college for a few weeks, but he didn’t seem interested in taking the typical route to Hollywood. Instead, he had moved out to Hawaii, and was living in a van and working at Gump’s. While he may have been a bit of a slacker, the guy did not lack for intelligence.
Pratt grew up in suburban Washington state, where he attended Lake Stevens High School and was a good student. Teachers remember him as popular and able to hang with any clique.
“Of all the students that I’ve seen, he probably got more out of his education than any other kid,” says Brent Barnes, Pratt’s high-school wrestling coach. “One day I walked into the lunchroom and Chris was having a full-blown conversation in German with these other students. I said, ‘Wow, I didn’t realize you spoke German,’ and he goes, ‘I’m in third-year German. I just force myself every day to sit down and speak with the exchange students.’ ”
Even then, Pratt apparently knew something wunderbar awaited him.
“He came into my office one time and said, ‘You know what? I know I’m going to be really rich one day,’ ” Barnes says. “He said, ‘And you know what? I also want to be really famous.’ I said, ‘That’s great, Chris,’ but I guess he was like Babe Ruth, calling his own shot.”
Pratt was evidently comfortable letting that fame come to him at its proper time.
“He would aggressively go after things, but it wasn’t like he was suffering for his art,” Lyndon says. “He just lets things roll off his back. Even on the set, his first time acting, he didn’t get frustrated.”
“He said, ‘I want to be really famous.’ He was like Babe Ruth, calling his shot.”
- Brent Barnes, Chris Pratt’s high-school wrestling coach
He landed decent TV roles on “The O.C.” and “Everwood.” Big-screen stardom mostly eluded him, though, as he auditioned for many major action franchises, including “Avatar,” “G.I. Joe,” even “Star Trek.”
In some ways, it’s almost better he never got any of those roles. They probably wouldn’t have been right, and he would have risked turning into Sam Worthington — an actor who has headlined major blockbusters, yet remained incredibly bland.
Pratt needed a role that would showcase not only his action chops, but his goofy charm. That role turned out to be last summer’s “Guardians of the Galaxy.”
“Somebody first suggested him to me. I thought, you got to be kidding me. This chubby guy from ‘Parks and Rec’?” “Guardians” director James Gunn told “Nightline.”
But just 20 seconds into Pratt’s audition, Gunn knew he had his man.
“Chris Pratt is the biggest movie star in the world,” Gunn said. “It’s just [that] people don’t know it yet.”
Another massive film franchise was also willing to take a chance on Pratt at nearly the same time: “Jurassic World.” The actor got the role before the filmmakers had even seen “Guardians.”
“He was a new idea,” Colin Trevorrow, director of “Jurassic World,” tells The Post. “But to me, he came off as someone who had a current level of honesty. He was an earnest action hero, while also looking like a ’30s high-adventure hero.”
He’s definitely not your typical action hero
One of the reasons Trevorrow cast Pratt, as well as co-star Bryce Dallas Howard, is that neither was a “home-run, bankable movie star” — so the audience has an easier time seeing them as their characters, making the story more believable.
“It’s refreshing that Hollywood is hiring people that could be our next-door neighbors,” Lyndon says.
“He’s not a typical leading man,” casting director Kanani says. “He’s relatable to men, women like him. He brings comedy to it.”
And that just might be Pratt’s secret weapon, and something that sets him apart from many of the action wannabes. Comedy is often an indispensable part of blockbusters nowadays, perhaps because of Marvel’s success and the studio’s patented blend of quippy dialogue and giant set pieces.
In the ’80s and ’90s, audiences were content with monosyllabic killers, such as Sylvester Stallone, Steven Seagal, Arnold Schwarzenegger and, most wooden of all, Keanu Reeves in “The Matrix.”
“They took themselves so seriously,” Kanani says. “It didn’t seem like they were having fun.”
Today, films such as “Kick-Ass,” “The Fast and the Furious” and “Kingsman: The Secret Service” bring a lighter touch to the genre.
The ’80s star that Pratt might most resemble is Bruce Willis — someone who could take out a roomful of baddies while also cracking wise.
And as with Willis, audiences seem just as interested in Pratt off-screen as on.
He’s wed to Anna Faris, whom he met while filming 2011’s “Take Me Home Tonight” — and who, like Pratt, has an easygoing likability.
It’s hard to imagine the couple sitting around their Hollywood pad moaning about being famous. Pratt always seems game to dish on his personal life, whether it’s oversharing about the poop photos he texts to “Parks and Rec” co-star Nick Offerman or speaking honestly about the difficulty of his son Jack’s premature birth in 2012.
Compare that to other leading men, such as Christian Bale or Chris Evans, whom we know little about.
“Chris has a natural affability,”
Trevorrow says. “He makes it easy for me to want to go on an adventure with him as an audience member.”
He’s a secret tough guy
He may have been best-known as the well-fed guy on “Parks and Recreation,” but Pratt is not naturally some doughy couch potato. In high school, he not only wrestled, but also played football and ran track.
“He wrestled at 220 pounds,” his former coach Barnes says. “He’s 6-foot-2 or 6-3. He was always ripped. There were times I worried about him being too muscular.”
No surprise, then, that Pratt was able to handle a lot of the stunts on “Jurassic World” himself.
“One of the reasons people love Tom Cruise is that they recognize that that’s him out there doing the stunt,” Trevorrow says. “I think Chris is on a similar path.”
Pratt’s stunt double, Tony McFarr, says he was mostly “backup.”
“[Pratt] just wanted to do everything — running through the woods, diving, rolling,” McFarr says. “I think it’s cool. Some of the actors who’ve been in the business forever will let their stuntman do it.”
“Often with stunt work, there’s a sense that that person has done that fall a million times,” Trevorrow says. “With Chris, he’s very good at making you believe it’s the first time he’s ever done something.”
The director says Pratt did not have to lose weight, as he’s done for other roles. And eventually, we’ll all stop asking that question anyway.
“I think the narrative of Chris Pratt changing his body will fade after a while,” Trevorrow says. “He’ll just be the Chris Pratt we all know.”