What To Know
- The new season adapts Lee Child’s 2009 best seller, Gone Tomorrow.
- Alan Ritchson feels that this season’s twists are next-level. And yes, there will be blood.
The bodies (and twists) are gonna be piling up as Alan Ritchson’s wry hulk of an Army vet targets some folks in very high places, but in Season 4 of Prime Video’s popcorn-studded action series Reacher, the nomadic big guy better watch out: The enemy may be closer to home than he realizes!
“One of my favorite things about Reacher is how fallible he is,” admits the perpetually booked-and-busy Ritchson, who is back and bigger than ever for an adaptation of author Lee Child‘s 2009 Reacher novel, Gone Tomorrow. “There’s so many times in the book he’s like — he does this Excel-spreadsheet rant about everything he’s cataloged in the case before and all his assumptions [and] in the end, he’s completely wrong! I just think it’s hilarious that that’s the protagonist that we have.”
As for his antagonist, that secret is bigger than Ritchson’s biceps. But we can confirm that his latest case kicks off with Reacher hanging out in Philadelphia, where he witnesses a despondent Federal employee on a subway train end her own life. Before long, the towering, terse monolith is caught up in a labyrinthine conspiracy involving a mysterious Indonesian woman named Lila Hoth (pop star Agnez Mo in her impressive acting debut) and her mother Amisha (fellow Indonesian singer Anggun), who may or may not have had Lila with North Carolina congressman John Sampson (Marc Blucas).
Prime Video
The opening three episodes (all dropping on August 12) also bring in a new round of characters orbiting Reacher‘s latest mission, including Philly PD detective Tamara Green (Sydelle Noel); a trio of Federal agents nicknamed Snap, Crackle and Pop; Jacob Merrick (Christoper Rodriguez Marquette), the Jersey-cop cousin of the subway victim; and Congressman Sampson’s sharp-as-a-dagger wife Elsbeth (Kathleen Robertson). The amount of intel dumps, misdirects, bone-crunching fight sequences. bursts of comedy, and blindside game-changers in just this trio of episodes is startling to say the least, but Ritchson proudly raves that it’s just the beginning of what he sees as the hit’s best.
“I think one of my favorite things this season, what I think is going to be so shocking is that usually what we’ve done — especially Season 1’s a good example — is that the mysteries and twists and reveals and the ‘just when you think it’s the head of the corporation and then he’s got his throat slit, I guess it’s not him, who is it?’ … you [found] out kind of right at the end what’s really going on,” he notes. “[Here] you find out like halfway through. It’s all of a sudden like, ‘Oh, oh…whoa!’ There it is, Episode 4. There’s the bad guy. It happens so suddenly.”
“When I was reading the scripts for the first time, I was like, ‘What’s left? What do we do for the other four episodes? And then it just keeps getting crazier,” the Motor City star continues. “It turns into something completely mad. I bet my life that this is going to be — by whatever metric you want, by order of magnitude — better than anything we’ve done.”
Prime Video
That an actor says this about their show isn’t that much of a stretch, but on this chilly day, late in the evening on the Toronto set last November, there is something genuinely sincere about Ritchson’s assessment. He’s not selling anything to the small contingent of journalists sitting around with their recorders running. He’s almost giddy about the idea of his series — much like his own booming career — getting better with age. The fact that he’s so high on what Reacher’s fourth season will deliver this close to the holidays and the end of production is also impressive. Especially given just how exhausting it can be.
“I wish we did this at the beginning of the season where on a Friday I might take a nap,” he jokes after spending much of the day working out a highly choreographed fight surrounded by burning hallways and marauding stuntmen. “This is a tough show to make and it’s relentless. There’s not a lot of cutaways to give a break. As you saw today, we’re doing that [scene], working our way through it and then we run off and we’re learning stunts during lunch for the next day. It’s been like that all season, so it’s severe.”
And messy. “So much blood,” he laughs, verifying that Reacher will definitely be taking his licks this season. “We’ve restocked several gallons of blood today.” That said, Ritchson shows no signs of fatigue and is clearly as big a fan of his character as the viewers are, so much so that he devotes as much effort working on Reacher’s emotional state as he does on his physical stature.
“On the one hand, my responsibility to this character and to Lee Child and what’s preceded this is to maintain a figure that’s familiar and rather predictable in his ways…so largely unchanging,” he explains. “On the other hand, we’re trying to build a catalog of experiences that humanize him in a way. As human as Reacher might seem to us and however sort of robotic he might be or stoic or reserved internally, my wish is that I’m somehow able to maintain a humanity and likability in this character that’s rather distant or guarded from others, while still leaving enough room on the canvas for the audience to project onto him.”
He continues, “I think if I do too much, we’re losing a bit of what Reacher is and who he is. And if I don’t do enough, he’s not human. So, I think I try to hold that tension.”
With those arms, we can see him holding that for a long time to come.
Reacher, Season 4 Premiere, Wednesday, August 12, Prime Video