No, Chris Pratt Wasn't Drinking Dangerous Amount of Water in Marvel Training
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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 Liveright Publishing, who confirmed that the “glass” error originated on their end and will be included in the first editions. “It was an error that’s in the book, and we are going to correct it in the next reprint,” said Fanta Diallo, a publicist at Liferight. She reported the company only became aware of the misprint “around the publication of the Vanity Fair piece,” but after conferring with editorial staff confirmed that the error remained unnoticed until Monday afternoon. It’s unclear how staff became aware of the misprint.
VF‘s excerpt was updated late Monday evening, replacing “glasses” with “ounces,” several hours after Men’s Journal published this article.
Liveright provided Men’s Journal with a statement from the authors which reads as follows:
“Thank you for the heads-up: we were drawing on a Men’s Journal article that referred only to ‘one water’ and we inferred a glass rather than an ounce. A correction is already in progress at Vanity Fair and we’ll also be fixing it in the book as soon as possible. We regret the error.”
Men’s Journal can confirm that the original Men’s Fitness story does note “ounces” as the measurement, although a subsequent Men’s Journal story referencing the 2014 cover story omits a specific measurement.
MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios hits shelves on October 10.
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