Katherine Schwarzenegger won’t run for office: ‘I have respect for it, but it’s not for me’

While I think Chris Pratt is a douche most of the time, I kind of like his wife. Katherine Schwarzenegger Pratt seems like a very uncomplicated, easy-going person. She hasn’t struggled and she doesn’t pretend to. She grew up in a wealthy and famous family, fashioned a career for herself as an author and influencer, married a movie star and gave birth to two daughters. She’s religious but not fundamentalist and overall, she just seems harmless and kind of boring. She’s currently promoting her latest children’s book, Good Night, Sister. She chatted with the New York Times about writing, raising her two girls and being married to Pratt. Some highlights:

She created a version of her own childhood for her daughters. Like her mother, she has built a career as an author and media personality, and also married a famous actor. She lives minutes from where she grew up and regularly visits both parents, who separated in 2011 and finalized their divorce in 2021. Ms. Shriver hosts a weekly mommy-and-me class for Lyla and her friends, and Mr. Schwarzenegger keeps a miniature pony in his backyard that the girls love to pet.

She loved her childhood: “I know this sounds crazy, but I really would love to just do exactly what they did. I look back on how much of life my parents kept private, and I have a lot of respect for it. I think they kept a lot of their relationship private, they kept us kids private — you know, they didn’t take us to red carpets, they didn’t have us parading around in front of everybody.”

Where she met Chris Pratt: She shared that the two met in church. Ms. Schwarzenegger Pratt is Catholic — she is the granddaughter of a Kennedy, after all. Mr. Pratt, she said, was baptized Catholic but grew up going to other Christian churches. The two eventually crossed paths at Zoe Church, one of the hip evangelical churches in Los Angeles frequented by Justin Bieber. Ms. Schwarzenegger Pratt had been going to Zoe with her brother Patrick, an actor, who was friendly with the pastor, Chad Veach. Though they have Zoe to thank for their connection, they returned to the church where Ms. Schwarzenegger Pratt was baptized, St. Monica Catholic Church, in Santa Monica, Calif., to baptize their daughters.

Daily life with Chris Pratt is not particularly glamorous. “If you would ask anybody how I was at home, they’d be like, ‘She walks around with her hair in a banana clip and a box of crackers with one of the children on her hip’,” she said. Eating too many crackers, she said, is “a constant thing that my husband is always making fun of me for. I should have bought stock in Mary’s Gone Crackers.”

She doesn’t want to respond to all of the criticism of her husband: “Growing up, hearing people say certain things about my parents, my siblings, my extended family” was difficult, she said. Her mother cautioned her to avoid the “never-ending” trap of correcting the record, however. “I see what people say. But I just know that it’s so far from the reality.”

Whether she’ll get into politics: “No. It’s really hard, it’s a lot of work, and I think if you grew up in it, you either see it and say, ‘Oh that’s something that I want to do,’ or you look at it and say, ‘I have respect for it, but it’s not for me.’ And I have respect for it, but it’s not for me.”

What she would do if her husband decided to run for office: “I mean, I think I would probably have to tackle that when and if that ever happened. I’ve just learned so much from my experience having my dad and my mom be in that, that I would really want to talk about that.”

[From The NY Times]

I respect that she knows that politics isn’t for her, but I think she should run for office! More women should, and I would prefer to see her run for office than her husband. When they got married, a lot of people believed (and still believe) that Pratt was setting himself up to eventually run for office as a Republican, just like his father-in-law. At this point? I don’t think he is. I think Pratt knows his limitations and while the desire might be there, he’d rather make tons of money in Hollywood and raise his family. Katherine would be a good “first lady” though – she has the kind of bland innocuousness which works as a political asset. Also interesting to me: they baptized their girls in the Catholic Church, not the hippie-dippy evangelical (cult) church.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid, Instagram.