Chris Pratt, the voice of Super Mario. (Photo by Stuart C. Wilson/Getty Images)
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Another trailer for the highly anticipated Super Mario movie has hit the internet; the movie looks gorgeous and surprisingly faithful to the games’ wonderfully weird story. If there’s a single criticism to be made, it’s Chris Pratt’s “Mario” voice.
It’s become something of an internet tradition to pile on Chris Pratt after the release of a popular trailer (usually a Marvel movie), and the Super Mario movie provided Pratt’s haters with plenty of material
Most of the voice actors we hear in the trailer match their characters perfectly; Charlie Day nails Luigi’s anxiety, Anya Taylor-Joy is a suave and determined Peach, and Jack Black is having a blast playing Bowser (and trying his best to create a gruff, distinctive voice).
Pratt, on the other hand, is saying Mario’s little lines in his normal voice, and it’s kind of weird.
There’s nothing wrong with Pratt’s voice, exactly; the man has a “generic main character” energy, and this matches the essence of Mario, an empty vessel inhabited by the player. But it’s strange to hear Pratt’s voice emerge from such an iconic character.
Obviously, kids watching this movie won’t care – to them, Pratt will be Mario. On Twitter, however, adult Super Mario fans were not impressed.
But Pratt’s flat voice wasn’t the only inspiration for the stack. Over the years, Pratt has earned a reputation as a staunch conservative and evangelical Christian; at one point, actor Elliot Page called him out on Twitter, claiming that Pratt belonged to a church that is “infamously anti-LGBTQ.”
The church in question was believed to be Hillsong Church, which views homosexuality as “sinful”. Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn once corrected the record on Twitter, insisting that Pratt didn’t deserve his bad reputation, while Pratt himself later claimed that he had never attended church, and even described himself as “not a religious person”.
Marvel fans didn’t buy it and regularly post tweets and memes framing Pratt as a homophobic MAGA enthusiast (for the record, Pratt has never made a disparaging comment about the LGBT community). After the Mario trailer showed a scene with Rainbow Road, Pratt’s haters took the opportunity to make a well-worn joke.
As for being religious, well, Pratt’s Instagram is full of posts praising God; there’s even a photo of him dragging a large metal crucifix up a mountain, which looks like a religious thing. At the 2018 MTV Movie & TV Awards, Pratt went on a long tangent about God, Jesus, and the power of prayer.
Although he may never have attended Hillsong Church, Pratt mentioned in an interview that he plays golf with Chad Veach, Zoe Church’s pastor. Veach previously told The New York Times that he modeled Zoe Church after Hillsong Church and starred in the 2017 film The Heart of Man, a docudrama about “the sexual rupture” that aligns homosexuality with addiction to pornography and infidelity.
Pratt haters might be onto something. Or maybe they just find the actor a little annoying, and the mass mocking has become a running joke.
Whether Chris Pratt is unfairly maligned or not, he’s not ideal for Mario; the man should have practiced that voice before he hit the recording studio.