Reacher Author Lee Child Thinks Alan Ritchson's Hidden Talent Is Perfect For The Character

Jack Reacher actor Alan Ritchson is famous for his brawn, but little do people know he's also got some brains. As Lee Child, author of the book series the "Reacher" TV show is based on, revealed in a 2022 interview, Ritchson's got a hobby that might surprise some fans: "When we hung out on set, I found out [Ritchson's] pretty good at playing chess," he said. "It fits really well with Reacher – he's always one move ahead of everybody else..." 

Ritchson himself elaborated on his chess hobby:

"In third grade, there was a chess club at school and there was a bowl of jellybeans at the front of the classroom. You'd play after school, and if you won you got one jellybean. I loved eating those jellybeans! I was viciously competitive. My older brother got me into that — we would compete against each other. I didn't see a difference in age, just an opportunity to win. I was living in LA and my brother was in San Diego. He's an engineer and he was at a plant nearby. He came by, we wanted to play a game so we set up a board. He hadn't beaten me in years – and he absolutely crushed me! He'd been studying all the books! He knew he was gonna open one up on me. Once again, I chased him down — I had a target."

So to put this situation in Reacher terms, Ritchson's brother was a lot like Paulie from "Reacher" season 3, except instead of being unexpectedly strong he was unexpectedly good at chess. Just like how Reacher felt after Paulie slapped him to the ground, Ritchson was stunned when his brother unexpectedly checkmated him. 

But rather than slink away in defeat, Ritchson took the L and used it as motivation to improve his chess skills and get his revenge. He doesn't say in the interview if he's gotten that revemge yet, but I imagine that his rematch with his brother was the chess equivalent of Reacher and Paulie beating each other up for ten minutes straight. 

Lest you think Ritchson was lying about his love of chess for some reason, he mentioned the game again in a separate interview three years later. Talking to Collider in February 2025, Ritchson compared Reacher's season 3 storyline to the classic game. "We're all playing chess at the same time," he said, "Trying to out-move one another. And I think that's what really makes it sing as far as this season."

Perhaps the season's opening sequence, where Reacher pretends to accidentally shoot a cop so that Zachary Beck will trust him, is the Reacher equivalent of a Queen's Gambit. Perhaps Reacher killing that henchman and stuffing him under the desk is his version of an en passant. Granted, the metaphor gets increasingly cluttered when you remember the sheer amount of different "players" involved in this season. Every new character's got their own agenda, which means that season 3 is more like those 4-player chess boards that are a lot less common. 

And although a 4-player chess board is a lot harder to navigate, Reacher always manages to pull it off; albeit, not without the occasional loss along the way. "[Reacher's] calculating. This possibility feeds into this possibility," Ritchson said in the '22 interview. "Also, he's not always right — there are times he makes a wrong assumption. I love the fallibility — if I'm playing a chess game with somebody, I'm not gonna win 'em all."