Chris Pratt's is a man of many talents, but he is not a man of many faces.
While promoting Universal Pictures' Jurassic World on TBS' Conan Thursday night, host Conan O'Brien imagined it must be hard to star in the film, saying, "You must have really worked on your scared face."
"The face that you give is really...You should do nothing. That's the key," the 35-year-old actor advised. "Because if they cut to a birthday cake, the audience should think, 'I think he's hungry for birthday cake.' Instead, they cut to a 60-foot dinosaur chasing me and they're like, 'I bet you he's scared right now.' The music helps and the edits and all that stuff. The worst thing you can do is over-act."
O'Brien proved his guest right by imagining his own reactions in the movie. Pratt demonstrated the "three faces" he did in Jurassic World: fear, love and pure joy.
In one scene, dinosaurs attack hundreds of park attendees. "That was crazy. That day was insane. The way it works is when you're having an interaction between yourself and a character that is going to be animated—we did that a lot in Guardians of the Galaxy and it's the same in Jurassic World—you want to create a real interaction...You want something you can really react to, so what they did for that scene was—I think it's called pteranodon? Essentially it looks like a pitbull crossed with a pterodactyl. Like this crazy animal that's attacking me," Pratt said. "So what they did—they wanted to create this organic reaction that I'm holding somebody—is they got this stuntman, Marty. Marty is a little person. He's stout. He's this buff little person and a stud stuntman. He works all the time. He's very durable. I was holding him and he's got his hands by his side. He's got his green spandex. Then he's snarling at me and growling at me, and you're going to seem my face, that is pure terror. That is real. He did a great job."
Marty might have done too good of a job, according to Pratt.
"I throw the thing down and it's dead, and so I throw him—and I chucked him—and he smashed his head. There's about 800 extras in this scene, so you can't just yell cut because it's such a high production value. You can just hear money being spent on this scene. His head hits really hard, and his job was to just lay there still like he was dead. The whole scene I was like, 'Oh, I just killed Marty. I think I killed him. I think I killed Marty.' No, he gets up and he's like, 'Aw, man it's all good,'" Pratt recalled. "He's bleeding down his face, they cleaned him up, and he did another one just like that. Because that's how stuntmen are, man."
Jurassic World is in theaters now.
E! and Universal Pictures are both members of the NBCUniversal family.)