After far too long a wait, we’re getting ready for James Gunn’s third Guardians of the Galaxy movie to go in front of cameras. For Dave Bautista and Zoe Saldana, this will mean long hours in makeup chairs to get themselves ready each day, but it will also, apparently, mean serious grooming for Chris Pratt’s beard.
James Gunn spoke with CinemaBlend’s own Sean O’Connell in the run up to the Blu-ray release for The Suicide Squad later this month (which you can pre-order here). On the topic of Gunn’s other big superhero movie, the director revealed that it actually takes Chris Pratt longer to get camera ready than it does Dave Bautista, because that beard requires a lot of care. Gunn explained...
The thing that people don't know is it takes Chris Pratt more time to get ready than Dave Bautista. It really does. Chris Pratt has like 18 levels of beard. He's got like eight people engineering his face before his shoot. He's got 42 different beard-shaver attachments he's got to use for the different levels of his beard. It's absolutely nuts the process he goes through. And near the end of the shoot, it got to be that Chris took more time to get ready than Dave Bautista.
There have certainly been some beards in films that likely required a bit of extra care to make sure they looked just right in every shot. Some of the beards sported by Robert Downey Jr. when playing Tony Stark come to mind, but I would not have put Star-Lord’s facial hair in that same category.
At the same time, I’m not all that surprised by this. As somebody who has a beard, but is never able to keep it looking as nice on a regular basis as people in TV and film, I’ve often suspected that there are teams of groomers whose sole job is to keep facial hair looking perfect.
Having said that, the fact that it takes longer to get Chris Pratt’s beard looking right then it takes Dave Bautista to get completely transformed into an alien is a bit surprising. You’d think from one day to the next only touch up work would need to be done to a beard.
And Chris Pratt’s beard in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies is, more or less, the exact same style he has in many of his roles. It makes one wonder if Chris Pratt needs to go through this time consuming process every morning before shooting on every film.
With Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 getting ready to start filming, James Gunn will need to get ready for Chris Pratt’s beard requirements. It may make him miss the days of The Suicide Squad, which arrives on Blu-ray October 26.
