There’s a right of passage passed down by action stars like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger that makes doing your own stunts sort of a tradition, but sometimes there’s a reason that studios hire professional stunt teams, as an all too eager Alan Ritchson recently found out.
Chiseled and strong, Alan Ritchson embodies Prime Video’s version of Jack Reacher with intensity, but his passion almost put paid to the actor’s future when he insisted on bearing the bulk of the physicality during a fight scene as part of the season three finale. “I got in a huge fight with my team because I was like, ‘I’m doing it,’ Ritchson told Entertainment Weekly in a recent interview.
In the episode that aired on March 27, 20255, titled Unfinished Business, Jack Reacher had his long-awaited clash with Paulie, played by Ditch bodybuilder and actor, Olivier Richters. The scene called for the 7-foot bodyguard to pummel Reacher for an extended period of time by drowning the hero at one point, hanging him by his feet in another sequence, and just generally throwing him around like a rag doll. While we won’t spoil who won the fight on screen, it turns out that Ritchson’s life may have flashed before his eyes as the cameras rolled.
“The whole point is you just watch Reacher get ragdolled for five minutes straight,” Ritchson said, explaining that in solidarity with his character and the audience, the actor decided to take on some serious stunts. “… so, I wanted the camera to come up and just stay on my face the whole time while I get smashed through a table on the barn floor,” he explained of his vision. But despite the crew advising against it due to safety concerns for their main man, the star ploughed on. “Everybody was like, ‘You’re gonna get killed and we’re not going to do that because it’s going to hurt you too bad.’” Ritchson’s reply? “No.”
“I was like, ‘I’m doing it, we’re doing it.’” In the end, the actor got his way. Well, kind of, as the crew offered some last-dich counseling along the lines of “You better not die, because we said you’re going to die, and we tried to warn you.”
When the director finally yelled, ‘Action!’ Ritchson jokes that he went through the “seventh circle of hell.” His much larger nemesis would pick him up and slam him so hard that the actor says he woke up “a day and a half later.” With his children watching on, Ritchson had to put on a brave face. “I didn’t want them to think that like, Dad died and was not going to be okay, it was the worst few minutes of my life.”
We respect you Alan Ritchson, but we’d also like to see plenty more seasons of Reacher, so keep a stunt man close by in future please!
If you too would like to forego the stunts and simply workout like Alan Ritchson, try our “Rep Like Reacher” workout:
Reacher Season 3 is now streaming on Prime Video and follow Alan Ritchson on Instagram.
