According to about 90% of critics, the the Guardians of the Galaxy movie is, to paraphrase them, the shit! Today we’d like to talk about how Chris Pratt was deemed so perfect for the role of Star-Lord, the director straight up offered to CGI a six-pack onto his body.

For those of you who didn’t follow the making of the movie as closely as we did, which is understandable considering the fact we followed it like so fucking close, Pratt was pretty much the first and choice to play Peter Quill, AKA, Star-Lord. An intergalactic ass-kicker who’s basically a cooler version of Han Solo with a much fuzzier sidekick.

That’s not us just throwing around lazy comparisons by the way, a lot of people, including the director of the movie and even Pratt himself have drawn comparisons between Star-Lord and Han Solo because they’re essentially the same character archetype, the loveable space rogue who gets the girl and shoots the bad guy in the dick.

But enough about that, we’re here to talk about Chris Pratt’s abs. Now as you can probably tell from the image at the top of this very screen, Pratt went ahead and got buff as all hell for to play Star-Lord. According to Pratt this frankly astonishing physical transformation from a saggy stomached dumbass in Parks and Recreation to this fucking guy …

Was the result of six months of intense exercise, eating right and presumably punching every mirror in his home until his body resembled a piece of granite. Pratt reportedly wanted to become this fit to show Marvel fans that he was taking the physical aspect of portraying Star-Lord seriously. Not that he needed to because as we all know, comic book fans are usually fine with casting choices that differ with the extremely narrow, hyper-idealized version of their favourite character they have in their heads. You know like that time Fox decided to hire a black guy to play Johnny Storm and everyone was totally okay with it.

But we’re moving away from the issue at hand, though Pratt has received nearly universal praise from critics and fans for his portrayal of Star-Lord, initially, he wasn’t even considered for the part. According to the director of the movie, James Gunn, he didn’t think Pratt was right for the role until he saw him physically audition for it.

During Pratt’s audition though, Gunn was so amazed at Pratt’s Downey Jr-esque channelling of the character that it took him less than 30 seconds to realise that he was the guy for the role. However, there was still one pressing issue to consider, Pratt’s rather sizeable man-gut born from a combination of drinking, eating and generally enjoying life.

We’d like to emphasize that we’re really not trying to be mean about Pratt or his weight here, by his own admission, one of the things keeping Pratt from auditioning for the part was his weight. Apparently Pratt didn’t need to worry though, because Gunn was so adamant that he was the man for the role that when quizzed about Pratt’s suitability he openly said:

“he was so good I thought, ‘If we have the first chubby superhero, then fine.’ He wouldn’t have been the first actor in Hollywood to have a CGI six-pack”

If you had no idea that it was possible to CGI a six-pack onto someone’s body, congratulations, you obviously didn’t see the piece of shit that was, Ghost Rider movie.

However, Pratt wasn’t really on-board with the idea of someone using a computer to make it look he had the kind of body you see on the cover on Men’s Health, not when he could just take 6 months off work and end up with the kind of body you’d expect to belong to a Samurai Jack cosplayer.

In the end, Pratt didn’t need any CGI to achieve the look he wanted to play Star-Lord, not that we care anyway, we’re just in it for the talking raccoon.