No, Chris Pratt Wasn't Drinking Dangerous Amount of Water in Marvel Training

An excerpt (published on Sept. 21 in Vanity Fair) from the upcoming book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios details Chris Pratt’s astonishing journey to get in shape to play the lead role in Guardians of the Galaxy. But one line that had many worried for his health is inaccurate.

When the former Parks and Recreation star was cast in the role of Star-Lord, he weighed somewhere between 220–280 pounds. Pratt’s transformation was aided by nutritionist Phil Goglia, who put the actor on a 4,000-calorie-per-day diet and instructed him to consume “one glass of water for each pound the actor weighed,” according to the passage excerpted in VF.

“I was peeing all day long, every day. That part was a nightmare,” Pratt told Men’s Fitness (a brand, like Men's Journal, owned by The Arena Group) for a 2014 cover story. This quote is also reprinted in The Reign of Marvel Studios excerpt published in Vanity Fair.

The quote above, along with the glass-of-water-per-pound figure, has been widely discussed on social media attached to a variety of speculative claims about Pratt's health and truthfulness as well as Marvel's treatment of its actors. Reposts of his statements on X (formerly Twitter) are flagged with a community note telling users, in part, that "anyone drinking this much water would suffer from water intoxication."

The note is correct. Our kidneys can remove about 20–28 liters (between five and seven gallons) of water each day, but only about one liter (0.25 gallons) per hour. Based on the book's measurement, Pratt would have been drinking somewhere around 15.5 gallons of water every day, an amount that could kill him.

There's just one problem: it doesn't appear he was ever drinking that much water, nor was he instructed to. The original measurement appeared in the aforementioned July/August 2014 issue of Men’s Fitness alongside Pratt's quote, but stated the actor drank “one ounce of water for every pound Pratt weighed: 37 cups a day,” or just over two gallons. An archive version of that story reviewed by Men's Journal today confirmed this wording. In a 2020 Men's Journal interview, Pratt told us: "I try to drink at least a gallon of water a day to keep my muscles in top form."

The figure has been regurgitated many times in the years since, including a 2015 Business Insider piece and a 2022 Yahoo article, but it has always been in ounces. This suddenly changed last week, with VF’s publication of the MCU excerpt. By transposing "ounce" into "glass," it upped Pratt's water intake by more than a dozen gallons, bringing the habit from urine-inducing to dangerous.

Men's Journal reached out to reps for Vanity Fair and Liferight Publishing to confirm whether the "glass" error appears in the MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios book itself, or was a result of editing on Vanity Fair's end. Neither was immediately available for comment. But its presentation in the excerpt juxtaposes an accurate quote from Pratt with an inaccurate measurement of his water intake at the time. 

MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios hits shelves on October 10.