Alan Ritchson on How Season 2 of 'Reacher' Delves into the Past to Solve Murders in the Present

Alan Ritchson

Season 2 of Reacher hadn’t even premiered when Amazon Studios picked up the series for a third season. But it wasn’t exactly a surprise. The series, based on the novels of Lee Child, became Prime Video’s most watched original series ever and its first title to reach No. 1 on Nielsen’s SVOD rankings.

Alan Ritchson, who stars as the title character, was a little bit astonished because he felt that Season 1 of Reacher was a story with a lot of unfamiliarity to viewers who weren’t readers and didn’t know the character from the novels.

“We didn’t know who Reacher was and it took a long time to hear him speak,” Ritchson tells Parade about Season 1. “Reacher wasn’t sure what was going on in Margrave or who the people were. It took a long time to breed a sense of camaraderie between some of those people. Still most people in the town couldn’t be trusted. So, there’s this distance.”

By the end of the season, Reacher had built relationships with Margrave's Chief of Detectives Oscar Finlay (Malcolm Goodwin) and Officer Roscoe Conklin (Willa Fitzgerald), and in so doing gave viewers a sense of who the man was. But that early unfamiliarity by the audience was somehow successfully overcome and the result was the aforementioned stellar ratings results.

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“[That the show was able to] endear itself to the audience is a triumph that I still don’t quite fully understand,” Ritchson continues. “Those problems don’t exist in Season 2; they aren’t inherent to the story this season. We are familiar with Reacher, we’re off to the races as soon as we meet him, we kind of get the assignment and get an understanding of what the season’s going to be about.”

Season 2 jumps from book one to book 11, Bad Luck and Trouble, when Reacher receives a coded message that members of his former Army unit, the 110th MP Special Investigations, are being brutally murdered one by one. Reacher reunites with three of his former teammates turned chosen family to investigate, including Frances Neagley (Maria Sten); Karla Dixon (Serinda Swan) and David O’Donnell (Shaun Sipos). Together, they begin to connect the dots in a mystery where the stakes get higher at every turn, and that brings about questions of who has betrayed them—and who will die next.

“Reacher reunites with people he’s familiar with,” Ritchson says. “We get to see a comfort and availability to him that we haven’t seen before because of the circumstances. We go from his only surviving family member, his brother, being pulled away from him in Season 1 to him being surrounded by family for the season. I think the juxtaposition of these two books is genius.”

Related: How to Read Every 'Jack Reacher' Book in Order

As a result of skipping the nine books in between book 1 and 11, Reacher seems less a loner in Season 2, a little more approachable, but Ritchson tells Parade that’s more due to the situation and the setting than Reacher changing.

“I don’t think I necessarily played him different,” he says. “But the circumstances called for a different level of responsibility towards those he cares about. There’s a fondness that I think developed between Finlay and Roscoe, maybe something more romantic for Roscoe [in Season 1]. But there’s a familial responsibility that I think Reacher feels towards his team. There’s just a seriousness in which he was approaching the circumstances that was different, but it’s still Reacher. At least, I hope.”

During our chat, Ritchson also talked about how Reacher is a man of his convictions, how he’s in it for the long haul, his feeling that Reacher is actually Lee Child’s avatar, and more.

Reacher has this really strong sense of loyalty or strong sense that his judgment is right. When the team starts to question whether one of their team has gone rogue and they’re so sure he has, Reacher is so sure he hasn’t. What does he base his convictions on?

His own judgment. This is somebody who processes people and all the information that comes out of them like a supercomputer. The team that he assembled, he picked these individuals by hand. And so, it was his own judgment called into question. If there was something wrong, if somebody’s gone rogue even years later, he would have had to see the potential for that then. I don’t think he ever saw the potential for that in this individual. So, it was not computing.

There are 29 books. Are you in this for the long haul? Would you play Reacher for more seasons to come?

Alan: Well, we’re in for three. That’s 26 more. I’d be down to do this until my 70s, yeah.

Season 3 has already been picked up. Do you know yet what book that is?

We’re halfway done shooting and I still don’t know what book we’re doing. I can’t figure it out right now. It’s killing me. But it’s fun scene work.

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Lee Child has written these books. What conversations have you had with him about the character and his perspective and how maybe he sees it different for TV than the books, which has allowed you to find your own direction in playing Reacher?

It’s so obvious to me that Reacher is an avatar for Lee. It’s Lee’s cartoon version of himself. He’s all the things that Reacher is, but it’s all just a little bigger. He’s even tall and he’s very lanky compared to Reacher. But Reacher is like the buff version of Lee. The way their mind works, the way that they have an understanding of everything, all that is borne out of the fingertips of Lee Child because that’s who Lee is.

I’m interested in what makes that man so curious. Why he’s so dogged now at this age when anybody else would have hung it up, nobody else would be doing interviews, nobody’s going to be traveling to do press at his age. He’s still doing all of it. That baffles my mind. I’ve been doing this a third of the time that he’s been doing this for a career. I’ve talked to probably one-one hundredth of the people that he’s talked to professionally for interviews. He walks into these interviews with a giant smile on his face. I’m like, “Dude, where does it come from?” That longevity is very unusual. It comes from gratitude. He talks about how grateful he is that his audience still wants to ask questions and that new audiences are still finding his books and he’s showing up for them. He’s an inspiring person and I’m less interested in what he thinks of Reacher and more interested in who he is as a person.

I read this morning about your new deal with Amazon. You already have a three- picture acting deal. All this is really fabulous. Is all this based on getting cast as Reacher for season 1?

Either that or my arc on Smallville when I was 19 really hit late. I don’t know which. But, yeah, Reacher’s been the fuel to the Amazon fire and I’m very grateful for it.

Season 2 of Reacher is currently streaming on Prime Video.

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