Yahoo Lifestyle Alan Ritchson Previews Reacher’s Season 3 Brawls With 7-Foot-2 Foe: ‘I’m Happy to Never Repeat Them!’
Jack Reacher is about to meet his mass.
And no, that wasn’t a typo.
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Season 3 of Prime Video’s adaptation of the Lee Child novels (premiering this Thursday with the first three episodes) is based on 2003’s Persuader, throwing Alan Ritchson’s titular man mountain into the dark heart of a vast criminal enterprise as he tries to rescue an undercover DEA informant.
Working undercover, Reacher runs up against a world of secrecy and violence… and a 7-foot-2 adversary named Paulie, torn straight from the pages of the source material.
Olivier “The Dutch Giant” Richters, a professional bodybuilder whose acting credits include Marvel’s Black Widow, plays the imposing Paulie, one of Maine “rug” magnate Zachary Beck’s (Anthony Michael Hall) small army of henchmen.
Speaking with the Reacher Season 3 cast this afternoon, TVLine asked the 6-foot-3 Ritchson what his fight scenes with Richters might look like, as Reacher again and again gets in Paulie’s face (or, to look at the screenshot above, at least his pecs).
“Well, I know what they felt like, and I’m happy to never repeat them,” Ritchson shared with a chuckle. “It was brutal.”
Ritchson said that ahead of his first fight training with Richters, he had been warned by his stunt double to brace for impact. “‘I know you ask people to hit you hard; don’t do that with him,'” the stunt guy told Ritchson after being “gently pushed aside” by Richters and landing some 12 feet away.
“I was like, ‘All right, cool. I got this,'” Ritchson recalled. “So we go in, and I don’t tell [Richters] to hit me hard, but I don’t tell him to hold back at all.” One unassuming swat later…. “I landed on a mat like 15 feet away.”
“‘Oh, so that’s what I’m in for!'” the Reacher star realized. “We then get into the fights, and we design a bunch of stuff where he’ll just pick me up and throw me, against walls and beams and stuff, and it hurts,” he reported. “It hurts to get thrown by that dude, he is so strong. It was pretty real.”
In addition to Ritchson, Richters and Hall, Reacher Season 3 stars spinoff-bound Maria Sten as Frances Neagley (even though that character was not used in Persuader), Sonya Cassidy (Lodge 49), Brian Tee (Chicago Med), Johnny Berchtold (Tiny Beautiful Things), Robert Montesinos (9-1-1: Lone Star) and Daniel David Stewart (For All Mankind).
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Reacher Season 3: Everything We Know!
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