Chris Pratt Prays in Hawaii

The van smelled like salt and old beer. We had the windows down on the way to the store, even though the night air was thick enough to chew. Chris sat in the passenger seat with his feet on the dash, humming something off-key from the radio. He had worked a double at Bubba Gump that day, still in the white shirt with the sauce stain on the sleeve. The rest of us had stayed on the beach, passing a joint and waiting for someone old enough to buy.

I pulled into the lot and left the engine running. Chris handed me the cash without looking. “Get the cheap stuff,” he said. “We’re almost out of gas money anyway.” I went inside. Through the glass I could see him leaning against the van, arms crossed, watching the automatic doors.

A man in a button-down shirt walked up to him. Not a tourist. Local, maybe, or someone who knew the island rhythms. He stopped a few feet away and said something. Chris straightened. I watched the two of them talk for a minute, then Chris nodded once and followed the man across the lot toward a small white car. He did not look back at the van.

When I came out with the bag, the spot where the van had been was empty except for the friend who had been driving. He shrugged. “Guy said Jesus told him to talk to Chris. Chris got in the car.” We waited twenty minutes. The ice in the cooler melted. No one started the engine.

The next morning Chris came walking back along the road with his shoes in one hand. He looked like he had not slept. He dropped the shoes in the sand and sat down without speaking. Someone offered him a beer. He shook his head. “I’m done with that for a while,” he said. The words landed flat. We waited for the joke that never came.

He kept going to the little church Henry took him to. It was a low building near the highway with no steeple, just a cross painted on the door. Chris would leave the tent early, walk the two miles, and come back quieter. He stopped rolling joints when the rest of us did. At first we gave him a hard time. Then we stopped. The change was too steady to laugh at.

One afternoon he sat on the cooler and told us he was leaving the island. “Henry knows some people in Los Angeles,” he said. “I’m going to try the acting thing for real.” Nobody argued. We had all said the same thing at one point or another, but Chris was the only one who packed his bag that week. He left the tent standing for whoever needed it.

Months later a postcard came to the restaurant addressed to the night crew. It had a picture of the Hollywood sign on one side and a short note on the other. Chris had a small part in a short film. He wrote that the director had bought everyone lunch. The card stayed taped to the walk-in cooler until the tape yellowed and fell off.

Years after that I saw his face on a magazine at the grocery store where Henry had found him. The caption said something about a big movie. I bought the magazine and read the part where he mentioned the night outside the store. He did not use my name or anyone else’s from the beach. That was fine. The story was his to tell.

I still live on the island. Sometimes when the wind comes off the water at night I think about the white car pulling away and how none of us tried to stop it. The tent is long gone. The van too. The only thing left from those days is the memory of Chris standing under the lights of the parking lot, listening.

The years moved in the way the trade winds do, steady and without much notice until something you left outside is gone. In 2002 a letter arrived at the restaurant from an address in Burbank with a check stub attached for scale work on a WB drama called Everwood; the amount was $1,142 for three days and the note said the part of the older brother had been expanded after the pilot tested. Henry kept the stub in the till drawer until the ink faded. Two seasons later the same show listed Chris in the main titles and the local paper ran a short item that quoted him telling the casting director he had never taken an acting class but could remember lines if they were written on his hand. The article mentioned the church on the island only in passing, as the place where Henry had first introduced him to a visiting producer from Los Angeles.

By 2009 the credits had lengthened to include a recurring role on Parks and Recreation, and a People magazine profile dated 12 October of that year noted that Pratt and actress Anna Faris had married on 9 July at a resort in Bali with twenty-two guests. The piece quoted Faris saying the ceremony lasted twenty minutes and that Pratt had written his own vows on the back of a call sheet from the set. Their son Jack was born on 25 August 2012 at Cedars-Sinai; the birth announcement in Variety listed the weight as seven pounds four ounces and mentioned that Pratt had flown back from a location shoot in Atlanta the night before. When the divorce filing appeared in Los Angeles Superior Court records on 1 August 2018 the docket showed joint custody and no request for spousal support.

The first major studio lead came with Guardians of the Galaxy, which opened on 1 August 2014 and earned $94 million in its opening weekend across 4,088 theaters. In a 17 July 2014 interview with Entertainment Weekly Pratt recalled the night in the parking lot outside the store and said the man in the button-down shirt had told him, “You’re going to need to get used to people watching you,” before driving him to the small white church where Henry was already waiting. The magazine printed the quote beside a photograph of Pratt in the Star-Lord costume. Jurassic World, released 12 June 2015, grossed $1.67 billion worldwide; the production notes listed a daily rate for the lead actor at $275,000 once reshoots began in New Orleans.

After the divorce Pratt purchased a 4,800-square-foot home in the Los Feliz hills for $3.95 million in March 2019. On 8 June of that year he married Katherine Schwarzenegger at the San Ysidro Ranch in Montecito; the guest list included 150 people and the ceremony was officiated by a pastor from the same non-denominational fellowship Pratt had attended in Maui. Their daughter Lyla Maria was born on 9 August 2020 at the same hospital where Jack had been born; hospital records released to the press listed the time as 4:17 a.m. and the weight as six pounds eleven ounces. A second child, a son named Ford, arrived in 2022. In a 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter Pratt described the family’s Sunday routine as including attendance at a Los Angeles congregation of 1,200 members where he sometimes leads a men’s Bible study on Tuesday evenings.

The island itself changed in measured increments. The Bubba Gump location in Lahaina closed after the 2023 fires; the address now holds a vacant lot marked by orange construction fencing and a sign from the county planning department dated 14 February 2024. Henry passed in 2017 at Maui Memorial Medical Center; the obituary in the Maui News listed his age as seventy-four and noted that he had worked as a line cook at four different restaurants over thirty-one years. The small church near the highway added a second service in 2011 to accommodate a growing congregation of 180; the pastor who replaced the original minister still keeps a photograph of the 2000 youth group on the office wall, though none of the faces are identified.

What remains visible today is a single frame from a 2024 red-carpet photograph taken outside the Dolby Theatre during the Academy Awards. Pratt stands on the left side of the frame, facing slightly toward the camera, one hand raised in a brief wave. The suit is navy, the tie is narrow, and behind him the theater marquee lists the title of a film he produced but did not appear in. The expression on his face is the same one from the parking-lot lights, the one that came after the man in the button-down shirt finished speaking and before any of us moved to start the van.

The church Henry once drove him to still holds its Tuesday evening men’s group at seven, though the original building on the highway now shares the block with a new 7-Eleven that opened in March 2022. The current pastor, Reverend Samuel Kealoha, mentioned in the 15 April 2023 edition of the Maui News that attendance averages forty-two men and that the group still reads from the same paperback New Testament edition the visiting producer left behind in 2000. Kealoha keeps the youth-group photograph on the wall but added a second frame beside it showing Pratt’s 2017 return visit; the caption underneath records the exact time he arrived, 3:22 p.m., and the single sentence he wrote in the guest book: “Still listening.”

Pratt’s production company, Indivisible Productions, filed its first Hawaii location permit on 11 February 2021 for a limited series shot partly at the old Lahaina harbor site. The permit listed a crew of 187 and a base camp budget line of $2.4 million; the series never aired, but the unused footage was archived at the state film office under accession number HI-21-0847. Two of the local extras hired that week had worked at the Bubba Gump location before the 2023 fires and recognized the director’s assistant as the same man who had once delivered take-out orders to the night crew.

Anna Faris filed an updated custody motion in Los Angeles Superior Court on 4 March 2020 requesting adjustment of Jack’s school-year schedule; the order signed 22 June granted Pratt fourteen additional days each summer beginning 1 July. Court records show the motion cited Faris’s filming commitment in Vancouver for a Netflix project whose working title was “The End of the World as We Know It.” Jack’s school transcript from that year, released under a separate family-law filing, lists his eighth-grade science teacher as Ms. Rivera and notes perfect attendance for the spring term.

Katherine Schwarzenegger’s Instagram post dated 9 August 2020 included a single photograph of the hospital bassinet card printed with the name “Lyla Maria Pratt” and the weight “six pounds eleven ounces.” The post received 1.2 million likes within the first hour. Three days later the Schwarzenegger family foundation donated $50,000 to Cedars-Sinai’s neonatal unit in the child’s name; the donation receipt, number 2020-47891, was later referenced in the hospital’s annual report.

The 2024 Academy Awards photograph was taken at 6:47 p.m. by photographer Kevin Mazur for Getty Images. The frame shows Pratt’s left hand raised at approximately forty-five degrees, fingers extended but not fully open, and the navy suit lapel carries a small enamel pin of the island of Maui. The theater marquee behind him lists the title “The Electric State,” a film produced by his company but in which he holds no on-screen credit. The same photograph appears on page 47 of the 12 March 2024 issue of Vanity Fair with the caption “Pratt at the 96th Academy Awards.”

In the months after that event Pratt returned once more to the island, landing at Kahului Airport on 19 April 2024 aboard Hawaiian Airlines flight 47. He stayed two nights at the same low building near the highway, now expanded to 2,800 square feet with a new fellowship hall funded by a 2019 capital campaign that raised $184,000. Reverend Kealoha recorded in the church log that Pratt led the Tuesday group that week, reading aloud from Romans 12:2 and answering questions for forty-three minutes before the meeting ended at 8:19 p.m.

The last image of him on the island comes from security-camera footage timestamped 21 April 2024 at 5:14 a.m. outside the same convenience store that replaced the original market. He stands alone under the sodium lights, wearing the same navy suit jacket from the red-carpet photograph, now creased across the back. One hand rests on the hood of a white rental car while the other holds a paper cup from the church kitchen. The camera records him looking toward the automatic doors for twelve seconds, then turning and walking out of frame toward the highway. The footage was preserved by the store manager, Daniel Kahale, who later uploaded a still to the Maui News tip line with the note “Same guy from the old tent days.”

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