Reacher Star Alan Ritchson Knows How To Find The Man Within The Myth [Exclusive Interview]

"Reacher" is one of the best action shows streaming or airing anywhere, and Alan Ritchson was born to lead it. 

Ritchson perfectly embodies the hulking, often sardonic, always stoic boots of Jack Reacher, the former military police officer who now wanders the United States as a vagabond who only stops to enact bloody violence on the unjust and the corrupt. Author Lee Child created a character of mythological proportions — a vengeful, righteous piece of modern American folklore come to life — and it's increasingly impossible to imagine another actor in the role. Ritchson's physicality is key (you believe that yes, he would actually stomp that guy's head in), but so is the innate intelligence that powers that physicality (he always finds the correct evidence to lead to the proper heads to stomp). It's one of hell of a performance in one hell of show. 

With season 2 of "Reacher" set to premiere its first three episodes on the evening of December 14, 2023, I sat down with Ritchson over Zoom to talk about playing Jack Reacher. In addition to getting inside his character's head, he shared his thoughts on breaking book canon to bring back popular characters, his ideal Reacher adventure, whether he wants to play to the character for the rest of his life, and why so many women are drawn to a series that has been commonly described as "dad fiction."

Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Jack Reacher is always the biggest guy in the room, but he's also the smartest guy in the room. As an actor, how do you tap into that intelligence? It's one thing to be big on camera, but another thing to be smart on camera.

Yeah. I tap right into Nick Santora's brain, our showrunner. It'd be really nice if I could just take credit for all the witty, wonderfully intelligent, verbose bits of dialogue and exposition I've got to say on the show, but the writing is so good. Nick Santora, our showrunner, understands who Reacher is and the humor of the show, how dark to make the show or Reacher. He understands the tone perfectly and I just have to get out of the way.

We've got two great writers involved in this. We've got Lee Child, who really set the stage, and then we've got Nick Santora and his team of writers. Just it's really hard to screw it up. I just have to say what they give me to say. It's so good.

To readers and viewers, Jack Reacher is the stuff of legend. He's Hercules, he's Gilgamesh, he's Paul Bunyan. But you can't really play a legend. You've got to play a man first, so how do you bring humanity to a character who everybody else sees him as this larger-than-life figure?

Oh, and that is the great work. That is the work. How do we humanize somebody who's mythologically large in our minds and in the books? I think there's something very human driving him, this undeniable pursuit of righteousness in his own way. He's got his own rules, his own set of laws, but there's something very human about his desire to see right done and wrong eliminated in the world. I think as long as I remain faithful to that desire, then I'm connecting to his humanity.

One of the potential downsides of each season being a different book is that viewers will wonder what happened to supporting characters from a previous season. Because I know Jack Reacher and his world's important to you, would you ever be open to a season that breaks canon a little bit to bring back Roscoe or Finlay? Or are you more of a purist?

I would, for sure. I would be a huge fan of that. I think we should. I think we should at some point. They were just too good. We're building a world here, and although this is an anthology, to be able to remind the audience that this is a real journey that he's taken and there are some people that are still there, I think could be a lot of fun. Yeah, I hope we can do that at some point.

Do you consider the show to be a separate canon from the books? A parallel world rather than a straight-up adaptation?

No, I wouldn't say that. I think that we are being very authentic to the books. The only time we stray is with a really heavy heart, and it's to expand on things like secondary characters that weren't really focused on in the book enough to give us a series worth of content. There's some expansion of plot points to give us TV, some expansion of secondary characters, but overall there really is a pursuit of authenticity and telling the right story, the story that Lee Child intended.

One of my colleagues spoke to you for season 1 and she asked you which Reacher book was your favorite. You singled out "Die Trying."

Still.

To me, there are two types of Jack Reacher stories if you want to really boil it down. There's the ones where he walks into a problem, and the ones where he gets dragged into a problem. "Die Trying" is a classic "gets dragged into a problem" story.

Right.

What to you is the ideal Jack Reacher story? What are the building blocks that excite you in a particular book or season?

I think you hit the nail on the head. There's something so ... what's the right word? I don't think it's irony. Oh, what is the right word? Well, in the trailer for season 2, you've got Reacher — the opening scene that Amazon has shared with everybody. You've got Reacher helping a woman who's being carjacked at the ATM, right? Have you seen this?

Yeah.

Yeah. There's a woman being carjacked. Reacher inserts himself in the situation, rightly so, and dismantles the carjacker and pulls him out of the van, and walking away says, "I'm somebody who prefers not to get involved." I just feel like that's like the biggest lie. It was the weirdest thing. I felt so weird saying that after kicking the sh*t out of some carjacker, that nobody really asked for his help.

I do think the stories like "Die Trying," where he's really drug reluctantly into the situation, is more true to who he is, because I think otherwise Reacher just wants to be left alone. I don't think Reacher goes into a diner in the middle of the Sierra Nevadas looking for a fight, but it finds him. That's sort of what the books do over and over. The ones where he inserts himself or [it] feels like he's kind of looking for trouble are usually not my favorite.

In the books, Reacher is canonically born in 1960, and ages in real time. That would mean he's in his early 60s in the latest books. He's getting up there in years. How long do you want to play Reacher? Do you see yourself telling "Old Man Reacher" stories in 20 years?

Yeah, I kind of could. I could see that. I don't know. Who knows what my career holds or if the audience will stick around that long. But yeah, if audiences are still showing up 10 years in, why stop? I don't know. Who knows? I don't know what the future holds or where my head will be at that point, if I'll be bored at that point, but so far, I'm anything but bored. I thoroughly enjoy the character and I really want to see a lot of these books that I love brought to life as a fan.

When I started watching this show, I'd read a lot of the books, but my wife was new to Reacher and she loved season 1. I started doing some research and found out that there's a 60% female readership for Lee Child books, which surprised me because I think that a lot of people categorize them as, lovingly, "dad fiction." Why do you think women have embraced Jack Reacher?

I will say on season 1, I found out from [producer] Don Granger that half the viewership for the films, half the readers for the book, a little more than half, were women. And I was surprised because I think of it as an action show. I think of it as this is an actioner, and women don't seem to be bothered by that at all, but there is something for everybody. It's well-rounded. There's the mystery, there's the detective work — everybody kind of wants to stay one step ahead of Reacher if possible as they try to suss out what's going on in the story.

Then a lot of the women ... I've had older women too, like grandmas, come up to me and they're like, "I love you as Reacher." I'll ask them what their favorite part of the show is. A lot of them, they're like, "I love the fights." They're really aggressive. Yeah. Yeah, it's surprising, but that's the audience.

"Reacher" season 2 premieres on Prime Video on December 14, 2023.