Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn has leapt to defend Chris Pratt after a social media user suggested the actor should be dumped as Star-Lord.
One fan suggested Pratt should be replaced by Aquaman's Patrick Wilson, however didn't share why.
"Marvel. Hear me out. Just… replace him," the Twitter user wrote, sharing pictures of Pratt and Wilson side by side.
Pratt has been under fire in recent years for his Christian views and the church he belongs to.
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The tweet quickly went viral and has since garnered 13,500 retweets and 204,700 likes.
MCU director James Gunn was one of the people who saw the tweet and launched into a scathing review of the comment.
"For what? Because of your made-up, utterly-false beliefs about him?" Gunn wrote on Twitter.
"For something that someone else told you about him that’s not true? Chris Pratt would never be replaced as Star-Lord but, if he ever was, we would all be going with him."
Another fan asked if Gunn about Pratt's views on homosexuality, to which Gunn replied by saying he knows the church that Pratt goes to and accused the fan of perpetuating a false rumour.
"He isn’t [homophobic]. I know the church he currently goes to. Do you? (The answer is you don’t, but you heard from someone who heard from someone who heard from someone where he goes to church, so decided, 'yeah, okay, I’ll believe this terrible thing I heard online about this celebrity!'"
Controversy about Pratt's religious views began three years ago when Umbrella Academy actor Elliot Page called the Star-Lord actor out following his comments about religion on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
"Oh. K. Um. But his church is infamously anti-LGBTQ so maybe address that too?" Page said on Twitter in February 2019.
Pratt has been dogged by the accusation ever since.
The actor did hit back at Page's accusation at the time, taking to Instagram to address the issue.
"It has recently been suggested that I belong to a church which 'hates people' and is 'infamously anti-LGBTQ," Pratt said in his Instagram story.
"Nothing could be further from the truth. I go to a church that opens their doors to absolutely everyone."
Pratt allegedly attends Zoe Church, a Los Angeles Christian outfit modelled on Australia's pentecostal Hillsong church.
While Zoe pastor Chad Veach has kept his lips sealed on social issues, Hillsong has been accused of having a history of gay conversion therapy, exposed in 2016 by the Daily Beast.
Topics: Marvel, Chris Pratt, News, TV and Film
Rachel Lang