Chris Pratt says tiny bands of vocal “wackos” on both the right and the left are fueling the political division across the country.
“There’s an illusion of that we’ve gotten more partisan, but the truth, if you’re looking at it from my understanding, is there’s a very small group of wackos on the right and a very small group of wackos on the left,” the “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Jurassic World: Dominion” star told ITK in a recent interview.
“Each of them are sort of echoed through mainstream media — whether it be Fox or whether it be CNN — and a lot of times there’s political posturing, to try to get onto Fox, or try to get onto MSNBC or CNN,” the 43-year-old actor said.
Pratt said there’s a “big group in the middle” politically that “instead of moving right or left, is kind of moving up and down” and “becoming disenfranchised and disengaged from the political process.”
Nonpartisans, he said, “feel like no one’s really representing them.”
Pratt said he and the team behind his latest project veered it “a little bit away” from politics, refocusing the Prime Video series “The Terminal List” into more of a psychological nail-biter compared to the best-selling 2018 political thriller of the same name that it’s based on, authored by former Navy SEAL Jack Carr.
In the Amazon original show, premiering on Friday, Pratt plays James Reece, a Navy SEAL who has to deal with his psychological trauma, the national security fallout and the apparent still-present threat from enemies after his platoon is ambushed during a covert international mission.
“Ultimately, this is a story about a guy who’s become a little disenfranchised with the complex and uses some of these insurgent tactics that he learns overseas and exacts revenge on the folks who make decisions from air-conditioned offices,” said Pratt, who also served as “The Terminal List’s” executive producer alongside Carr.
The series also stars Taylor Kitsch, of “Friday Night Lights” fame, as Reece’s best friend, as well as Constance Wu, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Patrick Schwarzenegger and Riley Keough, among others.
Pratt, who just welcomed his second daughter last month with wife Katherine Schwarzenegger, said while the eight-episode series is fictional, there’s a real-life threat that’s fracturing the United States.
“I think we just find ways to connect with one another, to understand that a lot of the division that’s being sown in this country is actually the result of foreign adversaries who are angry with us, who dislike us,” the Minnesota-born performer said, slamming Russian “troll farms” that are “on Twitter trying to help divide us as a nation.”
“Ultimately, the way that we could bridge this divide — because culture is upstream of politics — it’s just to kind of create a culture of unity that lives upstream of politics that gets so popular that the politicians innately are going to just f—— grab hold of it,” Pratt said.
Americans are capable of coming together, he insisted.
“I think we understand that we have a lot more in common than we think, that we go back to common sense, kind of come back to the middle and realize that we can engage some of these folks and not everything is politics,” he said.
“I think then we can kind of create a cultural wave that politicians are going to grab on because it’ll become popular.”