The long wait for more brilliantly simple Reacher (which has viewers revisiting those Tom Cruise movies during this hiatus) began in January 2024, although Amazon has made no secret about Alan Ritchson punching through plenty more windows and/or people in future. The Prime Video streaming service even renewed the third season before the second season debuted.
That next chapter has already wrapped with Ritchson moving on to an attempted “unrecognizable” role, so the time is growing closer for post-production to finish, too. Let’s piece together the clues on who and what we will see when the vagabond and his muscles return to smash more baddies.
Cast
Alan Ritchson is the only Big Guy known by that nickname in this show. However, a bigger-guy character named Paul “Paulie” Masserella will be portrayed by Oliver Ritchers, who is known as “The Dutch Giant” and is the world’s tallest bodybuilder. He is 7’2″ and has trouble fitting into cars, so it should be quite a sight to see him up against the 6’3″ Ritchson. As previewed on Instagram, “Paulie” is looking forward to beating the hell out Reacher and also committing slight vandalism in the process.
Beyond that toe-to-toe highlight (because we’re assuming that Paulie cannot go head-to-head with Reacher), Maria Sten will appear as series regular Neagley. Don’t otherwise count on an appearance from Reacher’s old crew from the second season, or from Willa Fitzgerald (unless she is pretending not to know anything) as Roscoe.
New third season regulars will include Anthony Michael Hall as antagonist Zachary Beck, who Deadline describes as “a formidable and successful businessman” and “a widower and single father of a 20-year-old son, Richard. He is the owner of a rug import company that Reacher and his cohorts suspect is a cover for a more nefarious operation.” Additionally, Sonya Cassidy will portray possible love interest Susan Duffy, a Boston-based DEA agent.
Plot
Reacher draws upon Lee Child’s plentiful supply of books with the show already taking on The Killing Floor and Bad Luck and Trouble. For the next bone-crunching tricks, the series will not take on Tripwire as hoped by fans, but there’s plenty of time to put Reacher in Key West (for pie) in the future.
Instead, Child’s seventh Jack Reacher novel, Persuader, will provide the story for this season that mainly takes place in Maine, where Reacher will go “undercover” as though that’s believable or something (like a hat-free Raylan Givens pretending to be a gardener in Justified) for the DEA.
This season’s logline doesn’t reveal too much: “Reacher must go undercover to rescue an informant held by a haunting foe from his past.” However, we can guess that Neagley’s presence will provide for book-to-screen changes. And where does Paulie fit in? Well, Persuader is written in first person from Reacher’s POV, and here’s how he described this “cartoon”-esque figure:
“He was a very big guy. I stand six feet five inches tall and I have to center myself quite carefully to walk through a standard thirty-inch doorway. This guy was at least six inches taller than me and probably ten inches wider across the shoulders. He probably outweighed me by two hundred pounds. Maybe by more. I got that core shudder I get when I’m next to a guy big enough to make me feel small. The world seems to tilt a little.
“His voice was light and high-pitched. He must have been gobbling steroids like candy for years. His eyes were dull and his skin was bad. He was somewhere in his middle thirties, greasy blond, dressed in a muscle shirt and sweatpants. His arms were bigger than my legs. He looked like a cartoon.”
Reacher sounds unusually, albeit slightly, nervous in this excerpt, but will we see this emotion surface on Ritchson’s face? So far, we haven’t seen Reacher loose his cool, so we will have to wait and see whether that changes.
Additionally, the leading man has already previewed some on-set food for those who are curious about what he might be stuffing in his face to fuel the upcoming fights.
Release Date
Reacher will stream in 2025 again. This could mean we’re a few months away or a full year, but surely, they won’t make people wait that long.
Trailer
C’mon, Amazon, we need a trailer. While we wait, would you like to guess what the most-searched scenes of Reacher‘s first season might be? Fights and junk food, baby.
