Tomorrow, the third season Reacher will kick off on Prime Video. Based on the books by author Lee Child, Reacher is about a hulking ex-military police officer — Jack Reacher — who goes from town to town fighting crime. You could call him a wandering do-gooder, although I prefer "hobo superhero."
And he does cut the figure of a superhero. Reacher is described as a huge dude in Child's books, “extremely broad, long-armed and long-legged.” Actor Alan Ritchson is 6'3" and packed with muscle, so he fits the bill. “Alan was born to play Reacher and I think he knows that,” Lee Child told The Independent.
Viewers apparently agree, because Reacher is one of the most successful shows on Prime Video. Before this, there were a pair of Reacher movies that came out in 2012 and 2016 starring Tom Cruise in the title role. Those movies did pretty well, but there were fans who objected to the famously short Cruise — he's 5'7" — playing a character who's supposed to be mountain-sized. Child said he "liked" working with Cruise, but that "the readers, ultimately, were right” about him not fitting the part.
“I thought the first movie in particular was excellent,” Child said. “It was a really crisp hard-edged thriller. Working with Tom was a pleasure and a privilege – he’s a really smart guy, he’s a smart filmmaker, he’s real fun. But you cannot escape the fact that Reacher is a huge guy.”
"I mean, that is a component in his entire approach to the world and the world’s approach to him. He’s huge, he’s implacable, he’s scary, and for all Tom’s ability in getting the internals of Reacher out, he is not huge and he’s not scary. So the readers were terribly upset about it and I think, ultimately, the readers were right."
Tom Cruise is a legendary action performer; just watch him in the Top Gun or Mission: Impossible movies if you need proof. In his 60s, he can do things with his body that would break me beyond repair. But yeah, if you character is supposed to be a wall of a man, maybe he was a tad miscast.
The Reacher series does all kinds of fun things with size. In the third season, based on the seventh Reacher book Persuader, Reacher will go up against a guy named Paulie, a bodyguard for a drug smuggler. Paulie is supposed to be even bigger than Reacher. For the job, the show hired Dutch bodybuilder Olivier Richters, who stands at over 7 ft tall.
“That’s the perfect illustration of how easy it is for me and how hard it is for them because all I have to do is type different words – it costs me nothing,” Child said. “Whereas to put that into physical reality on the screen, they’ve got to find that actor. It was literally an international search. There are very few actors even Alan’s size so to get somebody who is noticeably bigger was incredibly difficult. But they found the guy. He is huge! And very scary.”
According to Child, “there is no trickery at all on the screen” when depicting Paulie. “There are no fancy camera angles. There’s no CGI. Alan looks tiny next to this guy and to find that was a triumph.”
New episodes of Reacher drop tomorrow, Thursday, January 20.
Reacher spinoff Neagley is "moving quite quickly"
Remember when I said that Reacher was one of the most successful shows on Prime Video? It's so successful that the streamer is readying a spinoff about Frances Neagley (Maria Sten), Reacher's former military ally and an establish private investigator. When the idea was first broached, Sten didn't know if it would really go anywhere, but after it became clear that Reacher was a hit, momentum picked up.
“We are moving quite quickly on it. The first shoot day is tomorrow," Sten told Collider. "They moved fast on that one. That is how they had to approach it, in terms of timing it out with the Reacher show. And it feels very much true to how my experience of the show has been. ‘Am I doing something? Am I not doing something? Oh, I’m doing something. Okay, great. Let’s go.’ So, it’s exciting.”
"Neagley has a lot going on in her life. She has a history, and she has a life lived. She has some quite severe personal issues of her own that she’s grappling with. We just get to know her better and see her grapple with these issues. For anybody who likes the character, I think it’ll be nice to get to know her a little bit better. And we have rounded up such a great cast for this season of Neagley. I’m just thrilled to get going and sink my teeth in."
So the Reacher cinematic universe is expanding. If the third season continues to hit with audiences, and I can't imagine it won't, who's to say how big it could get?
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