They are two of the hottest stars on the planet, but it took a movie about loneliness in deep space to bring together Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence.
The pair appear together for the first time in Passengers as strangers on a 120-year journey to a distant planet when their hibernation pods wake them 90 years too early.
Pratt, 37 — one of Hollywood’s most sought-after leading men thanks to roles in Jurassic World and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy — joked that the pair had been “waiting for the perfect project” to finally combine their talents.
“When I read it I was told to imagine Jen Lawrence in the lead role,” Pratt said at a news conference, “and I was like ‘damn, okay!’
“So I read it picturing Jennifer and at the end I called my manager and I was like ‘this is amazing, but how possible is it that it could be Jen and, if it wasn’t Jen, who could it possibly be?’ There was no one else that got me excited. Sometimes a movie will blow you away and I think that’s this movie.”
No stranger to sci-fi, Lawrence gained worldwide fame for her portrayal of Katniss Everdeen in the dystopian young adult blockbuster series The Hunger Games, which grossed more than $2.9 billion (Dh10.6 billion) worldwide.
With four Oscar nominations, including one win, she is the world’s highest-paid actress, but has been a vocal critic of the salary gap between male and female actors.
Various reports in the trade press have put her pay-day for Passengers at around $20 million, while Pratt is said to have earned $10-12 million.
“I’ve tried to work with Chris before and it just didn’t work out,” Lawrence, 26, said at a recent promotional event for the film in Los Angeles.
The actress described Passengers as “the most original story I can remember even experiencing in a very long time,” calling script a “total page turner.”
“All you have is a very human story between these two people,” she said. “So I fell in love immediately with it and Chris was already attached, so I couldn’t have said yes fast enough.”
Passengers also marks Lawrence’s first-ever sex scene - a prospect that made her so nervous that she told The Hollywood Reporter last year that she got “really, really drunk” before shooting it.
“I found the build-up to the sex scene awkward,” Lawrence said in promotions this month for the movie.
“Then when I got there I realized how un-sexual sex scenes are. You’re sitting there with everyone that you work with and you’re like ‘OK, so I guess my leg will go there’ so it was a lot of build-up for nothing.”
Nevertheless, Lawrence and Pratt enjoyed themselves, overcoming the potential downside of acting almost exclusively with each other.
“It could have been really difficult because even just strictly filming wise, there’s no escape route,” Lawrence said.
“There’s no ‘We’ll cut to this if the actor’s bad’.
Fortunately, Chris is amazing... We worked together great, we had fun. That part could have been a nightmare,” she said.
Pratt says he was impressed by the talent working together for the film.
“I am a huge fan of talent and when I see the sets that people on this crew have built, you can’t help but be in awe. There’s a lot of really talented artists working on this movie, literally hundreds and hundreds of people so far and that’s not even counting the post production process which in itself could be another beast.
“I will forever be impressed by the magnitude of this type of a movie and this type of a set,” he said.
Don’t miss it
Passengers releases in the UAE on December 22.