Lifelong Garfield fan Chris Pratt on starring in The Garfield Movie: ‘I’ve come full circle’

Considering he is almost the same age as the cantankerous cat, Pratt, 44, says that giving him his voice in a new animated film was a “full circle” moment – having devoured the original comic strip as a child.

“I didn’t feel too much pressure,” the Guardians Of The Galaxy star says of taking on the role. “Mark Dindal, our director, had a very clear vision of what he wanted Garfield to sound like – he wanted it to sound like me. He pictured me in the role for years before he even had a conversation with me and in that regard, it really took the pressure off.

“I am a huge fan, like everybody, of Garfield. The comics are almost 50 years old, and I’m damn near 50 myself – it came out in 1978, I was born in 1979. I remember growing up, we had the newspaper, and the newspaper had the comic strip, and it had the movies.

“The first thing I would do is pull the comics and the movies out, and I’d see what movies were playing that weekend, and I would read Garfield. It’s kind of cool I’ve come full circle now, I’m in a movie about Garfield.”

In The Garfield Movie, Pratt voices everyone’s favourite curmudgeonly house cat who is forced from his perfectly pampered life in the suburbs with his owner Jon Arbuckle and unpaid canine intern Odie to join his long-lost father, scruffy street cat Vic, in a high-stakes heist at Lactose Farms.

Despite Garfield being a symbol of do-nothingness and finding new ways to minimise exercise and maximise a food coma, the heart of the film is an important message about forgiveness.

“Forgiveness and grace, these are themes that are resonant today and necessary as much today as really they’ve ever been through time,” Pratt says. “The people that we hold this resentment towards, sometimes we don’t know the whole story and in learning the whole story, it can allow you to be put into a position of grace and forgiveness.

“I think that’s a really important theme.”

The film is billed as bringing audiences everything they love about Garfield – and a few things they never knew, including “a vulnerable side to Garfield”, says director Mark Dindal.

“It’s hinted in all of the comic strips and sometimes, it’s more than just a hint, he may give Odie a hug in the second panel of a strip just to push him away in the third panel, ‘OK, that’s enough’,” says Dindal, who also directed Disney classic The Emperor’s New Groove.

“But he clearly loves Jon and Odie.”

l The Garfield Movie comes to UK cinemas on Friday, May 24.