Chris Pratt reveals how he spent his first Hollywood paycheck

Marvel star Chris Pratt is recalling how quickly he spent his first movie paycheck after living in a van in Maui.

Appearing on SiruisXM’s Sway in the Morning, Pratt said, “The first paycheck I got, I was like, ‘Are you serious? I mean, you know, I had lived on very little money for a long time, so the first big job I got, I remember, was … a TV movie. I got paid $75,000, and I was like, ‘I’m never gonna wait [tables] again.”

“About two months later, I was like, ‘Where’d that money go?'” he added. “I went back to Maui, I went to Australia, I traveled the world…That was just a crazy amount of money to me. I never could have possibly imagined making that amount of money and it went very quickly.”

“I didn’t know what to do with money,” he remarked. “It was like, it would come in, I would spend it, you know what I mean? It took a good amount of time for me to kind of stop and say, ‘All right, I gotta get wise about this.’”

The Guardians of the Galaxy star added, “I have to think about, what am I gonna do? How am I gonna get to the point where, if I stop working one day, I’ll still be okay, my family will be okay?

“If I’m paying for my lifestyle through acting, that was success,” he said. “It’s been like that for 20-plus years now.” For Pratt, some of his “finally made it” moments included his hometown friends seeing him in a commercial and buying his mother a house. “That’s when I felt like I made it,” he said.