After 26 books and two movies, Jack Reacher is headed to television with his own Amazon Prime series, Reacher. However, if you’re expecting to see Tom Cruise reprising the iconic action hero, you’ve got quite the 6’3″, 250 pounds-of-muscle surprise ahead of you.
In the first trailer for Reacher, none other than hulking Smallville and Titans star Alan Ritchson has taken on the role of ex-military-man turned renegade Jack Reacher — a far cry from the more slender Cruise, who starred in the 2012 and 2016 films. According to series’ author Lee Child (via Entertainment Weekly), Amazon’s reimaging of Jack Reacher — and Ritchson’s casting in particular — is significantly more in line with how he envisioned the character looking in his stories, perfectly conveying the levels of “stillness,” “menace,” and “goodwill” the Reacher we know from the books should have.
“When I picture Reacher, let’s say you’re in a bar or restaurant, the door opens, he steps in, and the temperature in the room drops by a degree, because people think, ‘What the hell is this? Even if there’s not an immediate threat, there’s an impact. That’s what I wanted,” Child said. “This guy stepped on the screen and had this stillness and blend of menace and goodwill that is always confusing about Reacher. If he’s going to be your friend, you’re very lucky. If he’s not going to be your friend, you’re very unlucky. All of that had to be transmitted just through stance, mood, look — and Ritchson had it right away.”
Despite this first look at the series’ only clocking in at about two minutes, everything Child is saying is made abundantly clear by Ritchson’s intimidating performance in it as the character slams inmates into tiled walls and breaks more than a few bones.
In addition to Ritchson, Malcolm Goodwin (American Gangster), Kristin Kreuk (Smallville), Willa Fitzgerald (Dare Me), Chris Webster (The Most Dangerous Game), Marc Bendavid (Dark Matter), Willie C Carpenter (Brawl in Cell Block 99), Currie Graham (NYPD Blue), and Harvey Guillén (What We Do in the Shadows) are all set to star in the upcoming series, which hits Amazon Prime on February 4.
