Chris Pratt Apologized For An Insensitive Instagram Post

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 actor Chris Pratt recently took to Instagram to issue an apology for a certain video he filmed. The most important thing to note? His apology was entirely in American Sign Language. The apparently controversial video was originally posted on Marvel’s Facebook page, but has since been removed.

Pratt began by explaining the nature of the since-removed video. His entire apology was also included as the caption to the post. “When I made a video recently with subtitles, and requested that people turn up the volume and not just ‘read the subtitles,’ it was so people wouldn’t scroll past the video on mute, thus watching and digesting the information in the video.”

He continued, “HOWEVER, I realize now doing so was incredibly insensitive to the many folks out there who depend on subtitles. More than 38 million Americans live with some sort of hearing disability. So I want to apologize.”

He goes on to explain that there are people in his life who are hearing-impaired themselves, stressing that, “the last thing in the world I would want to do is offend them or anybody who suffers from hearing loss or any other disability. So truly from the bottom of my heart, I apologize. Thanks for pointing this out to me. In the future, I’ll try to be a little less ignorant about it.”

Pratt genuinely seems to be taking the teachable moment to heart, recognizing his own misinformation and striving to remedy it on his own. He wraps up his apology by clarifying that his post was not prompted by a publicist. “As always, I control my social media. Nobody else. And I am doing this because I’m actually really sorry,” he included in the caption. “Apologies are powerful. I don’t dole them out Willy-Nilly. This is one of those moments where I screwed up, and here’s me begging your pardon. I hope you accept my apology.”

Pratt then offered a suggestion to Instagram that many of us likely overlook. The photo and video sharing app does not have closed captioning for its videos. Including the hashtag “#CCinstaNow,” the actor asks a very important question: “Why doesn’t Instagram have some kind of technology to automatically add subtitles to its videos? Or at least the option. I did a little exploring, and it seems lacking in that area. Shouldn’t there be an option for closed captioning or something?”