By then, Chong already had a substantial acting résumé.
She had appeared in Jean-Jacques Annaud's Quest for Fire, for which she won a Genie Award, and later appeared in films including The Color Purple and Arnold Schwarzenegger's action hit Commando.
Pratt recognized her.
Instead of treating her like an ordinary customer and quietly taking her order, he approached her with the confidence that had become part of his personality.
Pratt has recalled versions of their first conversation in several interviews.
In his 2011 retelling, he remembered approaching Chong and essentially saying:
“Hey, you're a movie star. What are you doing here?”
Chong looked at him.
Then she asked a question that would change his life.
Could he act?
Pratt's answer was confident.
He said yes.
The claim wasn't entirely invented—he had performed in school—but professional acting certainly wasn't his established career.
Still, he had enough confidence to seize the opportunity.
Chong was preparing her directorial debut, a short horror-comedy project called Cursed Part 3.
She needed actors.
And suddenly the charismatic young waiter standing in front of her looked like a possibility.
“You’re Cute. Can You Act?”
The exchange has become one of Hollywood's most famous accidental-discovery stories.
Pratt later summarized Chong's approach this way: she told him he was cute and asked whether he acted.
His response was essentially immediate.
Yes.
And she should put him in her movie.
That willingness to answer before overthinking the situation may have been one of the most consequential decisions Pratt ever made.
He didn't tell her he had no professional résumé.
He didn't explain that he was sleeping in a van.
He didn't say he had no agent.
He didn't talk himself out of the opportunity.
He simply presented himself as someone who could do the job.
Chong was interested enough to ask for his contact information.
There was just one problem.
Pratt didn't own a phone.
That detail illustrates how far removed he was from the conventional machinery of an acting career.
Today, aspiring actors can record auditions on smartphones and submit them electronically from almost anywhere.
Pratt couldn't even give Chong his own telephone number.
So he gave her a friend's number instead.
Then he waited.
The Call Actually Came
It would have been easy for Pratt to assume nothing would happen.
People make promises every day.
Especially in entertainment, vague offers of future work often lead nowhere.
But Chong followed through.
She contacted him.
Pratt auditioned.
And he got the role.
Within days, the young man who had been serving shrimp to tourists was traveling to Los Angeles.
In a later television interview, Pratt recalled the transformation in remarkably simple terms: one moment he was waiting tables and living in a van; shortly afterward, he was in Los Angeles.
And he never returned to the life he had been living before.
Cursed Part 3
The project was called Cursed Part 3, although the title is somewhat misleading.
It was not actually the third installment of an established horror franchise.
The short film was a low-budget horror-comedy satire and marked Chong's directorial debut.
Pratt played a character named Devon.
This was not Guardians of the Galaxy.
There were no enormous studio budgets.
There were no red carpets announcing the arrival of Hollywood's next major star.
And Pratt himself has been remarkably unsentimental about the quality of his performance.
Years later, he jokingly described the movie in extremely harsh terms, calling it the worst movie he had ever seen and criticizing his own acting.
But the quality of Cursed Part 3 ultimately mattered far less than what making it gave him.
For the first time, Pratt was on a real set.
He was acting for a camera.