NEW YORK, Feb. 21 (UPI) — Alan Ritchson, who is 6-foot-3-inches tall, admits he had some reservations about his undercover character using a tiny phone hidden in the sole of his boot to contact law-enforcement while locked up by a powerful criminal in the Reacher Season 3 premiere.
“It’s a little scary, I’ve got to be honest, because I felt like [comedian] Will Ferrell on SNL,” Ritchson, 42, told UPI in a Zoom interview this week.
“They mailed the phone to my house, way before I got to town to start shooting the show, just to see what it looked like with me holding it up to my head,” he laughed.
“It’s a tiny phone and, so, every time I pulled it out of the shoe, I’d have an entire scene where I’m having some intense conversation through the phone. I felt a little ridiculous and I’m just sort of hoping and praying people will make memes of me.”
Season 3, which is an adaptation of Lee Child’s best-selling novel Persuader, premiered on Prime Video Thursday.
The season follows the former U.S. Army military police officer-turned-crime-solving-drifter Jack Reacher (Ritchson) as he joins forces with Drug Enforcement Agent Susan Duffy to take down Zachary Beck (Anthony Michael Hall), a powerful rug merchant/drug dealer, with an enormous bodyguard named Paulie (Olivier Richters), as well as Quinn (Brian Tee), a mystery man from Reacher’s past.
“Reacher has his own set of rules, his own kind of moral compass and it may be different than most of ours,” Ritchson said.
“If he has all the facts and the facts point to the fact that somebody is what he would deem a bad person, then I think he is happy to eliminate that person,” the actor added. “That’s sort of the motive or the impetus for this entire book and season of the show.”
Ritchson said Persuader is one of his favorite Jack Reacher novels and he was eager to bring it to the screen.
“I love the fact that we’re backing Reacher into a corner where he’s this lone wolf trying to solve this problem, largely on his own, and he’s doing it from a kind of prison,” he added.
“He’s kind of handcuffed in a lot of ways. That just continually ratchets up the tension and it’s fun to read. It’s even funner to play it on screen and, hopefully, it’s fun for audiences to experience that.”
Although Reacher collaborates with Duffy and her cohorts, he regards them more as a means to an end than a team he can trust.
“He wants to catch a bad guy and Duffy wants to catch a different bad guy and they need each other and they need the information that the other person has to catch their guy,” Ritchson said.
“So, they have to work together begrudgingly,” he added. “It’s fun to see the dynamic there at play.”
