Alan Ritchson Discusses Reacher, Lee Child, And The Long Audition Process
Lee Child's taciturn ex-military colossus Jack Reacher has become the stuff of literary mythology after storming his way through 26 successful novels. When he was last translated to the screen, he infamously lost a few inches, but in Reacher, Amazon Prime Video's new eight-episode series adapting Child's first Reacher novel, Killing Floor, that wrong is going to be righted. Titans star Alan Ritchson, who dropped by the Empire podcast to explain how his Reacher is the genuine deal and that he's in it for the long haul, is filling the remarkable, massive boots of the main man himself.
How challenging was it to capture Reacher's body and fighting style?
Ritchson, Alan: That was a great accomplishment.
What was your strategy for the audition before you started? What character were you portraying him as?
I simply tried to stay true to the script. However, they passed over me and everyone else who auditioned for this the first time. Nobody, they felt, had gotten it right. When we originally auditioned, there was a separate screenplay that went out to everyone who looked like Reacher or was the correct size or shape or anything. Everyone, I believe, auditioned. In the books, Reacher says very little. 'Reacher said nothing,' for example, is a well-known phrase. It's all over the place in the literature. And it was this part of Reacher that the filmmakers were attempting to capture in the film.
The Grove in Los Angeles hosted a drive-in showing of "Jack Reacher," an Amazon series based on the popular Lee Child books.
On the arrivals carpet, Alan Ritchson, who plays Jack Reacher in the series, told Variety, "I love this character." "There's no better medium for novels than eight to ten episodes, especially for novels." This is the ideal length of time to tell these stories."
The Jack Reacher story, which has sold more than 100 million books and been made into two films starring Tom Cruise, continues to have "such a wide reach." Willa Fitzgerald, who plays Officer Roscoe Conklin in the series, remarked, "It has spoken to so many different types of people from different walks of life."