We spoke to the huge American action star about murdering baddies and needing surgery from overtraining

Storm Santos

In Amazon Prime’s hit show Reacher, the dimensions of its star are truly a sight to behold. Played with calm menace by Alan Ritchson, Jack Reacher – the gruff, genius-IQ ex-US Army Major protagonist of British author Lee Child’s 100 million-selling book series – is blessed with a torso the approximate size of a dinner table. Childs, for his part, once described the character as looking, when shirtless, like ‘a condom crammed with walnuts’.

While the successful Tom Cruise-starring movie adaptation downplayed Reacher’s physical proportions to the chagrin of fans, the TV reboot has found a wonderfully large foil in Ritchson.

The series follows the itinerant veteran as he traipses across America uncovering the shadowy conspiracies behind unexplained homicides, first in the fictional Georgia town of Margrave and then again in the not-fictional city of New York. Trouble, as Reacher says, always seems to find him in the excellent first two seasons of this refreshingly unpretentious and action-packed show.

Here, Ritchson speaks to GQ about moral simplicity, murdering baddies and wrecking his body from overtraining.

GQ: The show went from sleeper hit in season one to an instant chart-topper with season two: why do you think the show has resonated with so many people?

Alan Ritchson: It’s confounding. The readership of the books is an unexpected demographic: just as many women read these books as men. There was an interesting article about how people say “men want to be him and women want to sleep with him”, but there’s an independence and freedom to Reacher that women clearly want, too.

We assume freedom is a male mentality, but a lot of women share the same desires. I guess part of the success is that there was wish fulfilment for a lot more people than first expected.

The show also operates in this world of moral simplicity. We live with so much grey area, but in the show, you know where you stand: The good guys are really good. The baddies are incredibly bad.

[In the real world], there’s a deep-seated frustration we share, as we’re stuck watching injustice prevail: the judicial system is clumsy and long-winded and it seems like we don’t often see justice done in our lifetime.

In that world, who wouldn’t want to be Reacher? This guy who looks out for the well-being of the innocent, and acts as judge, jury, and often executioner. Who hasn’t wished they could take it upon themselves to cleanse the world of bad guys?

I know you touched on the unexpected demographics, but the show has been called ‘peak Dad TV’ and—

It’s so weird. I keep seeing that.

You’re a dad. Tell me about it.

It’s funny: I’ve shown my kids the show. I let them watch season one – but I wouldn’t let them see the naked guy hanging crucified on the wall [who had his bollocks chopped off and was forced to swallow them whole], but everything else was… Within context, it all made sense.

They loved it, man. For me, it’s not ‘Dad TV’, it’s ‘family TV’. I walk down the street and little ladies on their walkers are like [adopts the voice of a decrepit old woman] “Reacher… Reacher…” It’s such a misnomer to me to qualify this as ‘Dad TV’. But I am a father and I, too, love the show. Maybe it does work.

Besides the added facial hair, how did you approach season two differently?

Well, expectations were – and are now forever – scarily high. It’s difficult not to keep that in the front of your mind. The work is to block that out and try to honour the simplicity of what’s on the page. Actors can sometimes overdo things when it feels like the scope of what audiences expect has grown.

Being okay with the simplicity of Reacher is tricky because you feel like you should do something bigger and different and louder… The amount of cooks in the kitchen on season one was unbelievably difficult to carry, too. Everybody had an opinion.

We’d shoot things 12 or 15 completely different ways trying to figure the character out: “Do we want Reacher to come across as funny or dry? How dramatic? How full of malice?” We’d get one scene with a range of really different takes. Eventually, we figured out the right zone for the show and [now] there are way fewer producers on set. They were just like “Alright, well, you got it”.

A lot’s been made about the size of Reacher: What’s the key to putting on 30lb of muscle without losing the heart of the character among the biceps?

I want to clarify one thing because in every interview someone says ‘30 pounds of muscle’. I put on 30 pounds! I don’t know how much of that was lean muscle. I went from 205lb to 235lb in eight months, I was eating a tonne. I don’t think all of that was muscle.

A good chunk was – a little more than half, maybe. But I didn’t take steroids, I didn’t take testosterone. There was only one way to get where I needed to be and that was hard work. I fucking wrecked my body, dude. It was too much. I didn’t have time to heal. I would strain something and I was like, “I don’t care! I’m working through it!” I suffered the consequences.

When I finished [season one], I needed surgery. I couldn’t breathe well. I got a blood panel done and found out I had no testosterone left [because of overtraining]. My doctor was like, “You need to be on testosterone”. [Testosterone therapy] was a real gift because now I’m able to easily maintain that size.

My workouts are short and sweet – maybe 30 minutes a day. There’s no doubt that people place a big emphasis on his size, but to me, the character is much more than that.

The heart of the character really lies in his sardonic sense of humour, which is incredibly fun to play. He’s a smart guy, and isn’t afraid to be a smart-ass. That underlying humour is what brings depth to him as a character, and also keeps audiences entertained.

I’d be remiss to not ask you about your favourite murder on the show, since Reacher does so much of it. He’s really turned highlighting the vulnerable crumple-zones of the skeleture of bad bastards into a fine art. Which one’s been your favourite?

Firstly, as you say: If you’re going to murder someone, murder them right. There’s one fight that sticks out in my mind because it was brutal. In season one [the penultimate episode, ‘Reacher Said Nothing’], I’m fighting a guy with a crowbar and he like cracks a vase over my head and we end up in the pool, and he’s choking me out with a crowbar and I see a gun that has fallen in the bottom of the pool and I shoot him from behind my back, right?

That fight took so much out of me! I had a beanie on and when I got cracked in the head with a vase… Look, it was a sugar vase and I said to the guy to just fucking rock me with that thing, man. It looked really cool. It shatters and I’m like… I feel it. I am dazed. We finish the sequence and I take my beanie off and there is blood everywhere. I told the stunt guys and was like, “Dude, that was a sugar vase?” and they go, “Oh yeah, the sugar vase doesn’t help at all”.

When you’re showing Reacher to your kids, are you like “And… that’s the one that cut my head open.”

Yep, and they thought it was pretty cool, too.