Chris Pratt Wanted a Real AI to Play His Judge Instead of Rebecca Ferguson in MERCY
Some actors would sign on instantly if they knew they’d be sharing the screen with Rebecca Ferguson, but Chris Pratt briefly toyed with a very different idea for his latest sci-fi thriller, Mercy.
Instead of casting a human co-star at all, Pratt wondered if the film should lean fully into technology and let an actual artificial intelligence handle the role.
The futuristic film stars Pratt as a police officer accused of murdering his wife. With his fate hanging by a thread, his character is restrained in a chair and interrogated by an AI judge who listens to his testimony and decides whether he lives or dies.
In the final version, that all-powerful presence is played by Ferguson, whose voice and performance anchor the entire interrogation.
Given her work across several great film and TV projects, Ferguson feels like a natural fit for a cold, authoritative intelligence. Still, Pratt admitted that early conversations went in some strange directions.
“I remember talking about the various people who could play these characters, and early on, I was like, 'Should we have it be an AI, where the judge is actually AI, and we create an AI?’” Pratt revealed to Entertainment Weekly.
“And everyone was like, 'No, I don't think so,'" he recalls, acknowledging that it might not have played out so great. Laughing about the polite rejection, the star added, "I was like, 'Yeah, I don't think that's a good idea at all.”
The idea didn’t stick, but Pratt made it clear that tossing around wild concepts is part of the creative process, even when they don’t survive the room.
“So it was actually never a possibility any more than anything is a possibility when you're zeroing in on what the outcome is going to be and what the choices are that you're going to make. It's a collaborative effort,” Pratt explained.
If that pitch sounds unusual, the next one goes even further off the rails. Pratt also floated the idea of turning the AI judge into a famous face, just not one anyone would expect in a grim sci-fi courtroom.
“It's dumb, it's going to be dumb. It did not make sense, and I'm glad we didn't do it, but one of my pitches early on was like, ‘What if [my character] could pick the judge, and I could pick Oprah, or I could pick anyone I want. Because ultimately it's just a face on a [screen]. And I thought that would be funny to have Oprah do it.”
Luckily they went with Ferguson, whose presence gives the interrogation real weight, and it’s hard to imagine an algorithm or a talk show icon delivering the same chilling effect.