By now, filmmakers Joe and Anthony Russo know that people have seen plenty of trailers for their new film The Electric State and wondered: What is up with Chris Pratt’s hair?
The AI-era road trip movie casts Pratt has an eccentric smuggler who joins forces with an orphaned teen (played by Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown) and a pair of robots as she searches for her lost brother.
But sporting a handlebar mustache and shaggy hairdo, Pratt, best known for playing Star-Lord in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy films, looks almost unrecognizable as a relic from the ’80s.
“That was all Chris Pratt,” Joe tells Postmedia of the actor’s distinctive look. “We told Pratt what we were looking for. We said we need a character who’s stuck in the late ’70s, early ’80s. That was his heyday … We really wanted to represent him through costume and facial hair as somebody who’s out of step with time. He went to work with his hairstylist and came back with that.”
“He told us about a neighbour he had in his childhood who had a similar vibe,” Anthony adds.
Set in an alternate version of the ’90s, The Electric State, which hits Netflix today, is inspired by author-artist Simon Stalenhag’s graphic novel and takes place on a planet ravaged by humanity’s war against robots, which have been outlawed and put in their own quarantine zone somewhere in the American Midwest.
In addition to Pratt and Brown, the film also stars Oscar-winner Ke Huy Quan, Stanley Tucci, Jason Alexander, Woody Norman and Giancarlo Esposito, and features the vocal talents of Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie, Brian Cox, Jenny Slate, Hank Azaria, Colman Domingo and Alan Tudyk.
Anthony says the story, which is penned by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, “felt resonant and timely” given their roles as parents raising children in a digital age. Much like our own society, in this sci-fi story, humans have become numbed by their reliance and obsession with technology.
“One of the things Joe and I are most conscious in terms of the challenges of the modern age is dealing with our digital lives. Especially because we have children; they’re struggling with this more than adults in may ways,” Anthony says.
After their work on Marvel’s Captain America and Avengers movies, the directing team aim to transport viewers to a completely new world that harkens back to the emotionally resonant fantasies they both loved as youngsters growing up in Ohio.
Since pressing pause on their work with Marvel following the release of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, the Russos stepped away from comic-book IP to concentrate on an original slate of films, directing Cherry (a crime drama they made for Apple) and The Gray Man, action pic that starred Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling and streamed on Netflix.
Along the way the brothers and business partners launched AGBO, an artist-friendly studio aimed at telling smaller-scale stories, produced Chris Hemsworth’s Extraction movies and were part of the brains behind Amazon’s globe-trotting Citadel spy series that starred Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden.
The pair also had a hand in helping launch 2023’s best picture winner Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Likening The Electric State to a live-action Pixar movie, the duo say the film highlights a bygone era that youngsters today who endless scroll through social media apps won’t necessarily understand.
“Some great music came out in the ’90s. There were a lot of great video games. The ’90s really marked a departure from analogue to digital. When you look back on it, maybe you weren’t excited when you were in it, but it was a really pivotal decade,” Joe says.
But after taking a breather from Marvel, the brothers are now getting ready to return to the world of superheroes with a pair of Avengers movies —Doomsday and Secret Wars— they will film back-to-back in the U.K. beginning later this spring.
The twosome announced they are coming back to the film franchise alongside Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr., who will play the classic Fantastic Four villain Doctor Doom.
Anthony said they got an inkling to rejoin Marvel after they had a chance to “go away and do some other wonderful work over the past few years.”
“In order to do Infinity War and Endgame justice, we really had to think we really were concluding our journey through the MCU, and we were concluding other characters’ journeys through the MCU,” Anthony says. “A portion of the MCU was ending with those stories, and I think that helped us deliver something that was emotionally impactful, because we did believe that and we treated it that way.”
As Marvel continued with films and TV shows that explored a new roster of heroes, as well expanding the adventures of older characters from its Infinity Saga, the siblings say they were intrigued by returning for a new team-up that will invite superheroes from across Marvel’s parallel universes
“The narrative just started to re-seed itself in our brains,” Anthony adds. “We started to find a road forward through the work Marvel had done since Endgame. It was just a very natural process of a sort-of regrowth of us finding a story that we wanted to tell, and really needed to tell.”
The Electric State is now streaming on Netflix