I’m still physically recovering from the Mario movie cast announcement, mostly because if you’d given me 100 guesses to try and pick who would play the role of Mario—a short, thicc Italian-American—I would not have picked the ripped dude who is a Guardian of the Galaxy.
I know in hindsight this makes me look like an idiot, since this is a voice acting role and not an acting role, and that Pratt has already done really high-profile animation work with the LEGO movies, but still! When you think “It’s’a Me!”, you don’t think Chris Pratt!
Which is probably the same reason most other folks weren’t expecting a casting decision like this either, hence all the surprise. If you go down the whole list, so many of them make sense! Jack Black was a lock somewhere, Keegan-Michael Key does this stuff all the time (he was in Storks for God’s sake), Charlie Day will do wonders as a bumbling Luigi, and if you trawl through old forum posts and Tumblr blogs you’d probably find 1000 people saying Anna Taylor-Joy would make a perfect Peach.
Pratt, though? Nobody was expecting it. Nobody except this guy.
Imagine you’re just a regular person, sitting around one day, minding your own business, and the very boundaries between time and space suddenly open up before you. All sparks and circles, ala Dr. Strange. Ahead lies a limitless horizon, full of endless possibilities, unlimited futures and the culmination of all human knowledge.
And the one thing you get to see, before the sparks suddenly zip shut and you’re returned to this mundane existence, is that Chris Pratt is being cast as Mario in an upcoming animated feature film. It’s not much, but at least Twitter lets you share your knowledge with the world.
(Here’s hoping the Martinet stuff is at least wrong, and he’s in there somewhere as Mario, even if he’s just playing “Old Mario” and doing the narration at the beginning of the movie).