This story was featured in The Must Read, a newsletter in which our editors recommend one can’t-miss story every weekday. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
Alan Ritchson and I have just beat the lunch rush at Peter Luger, the Brooklyn institution that’s been feeding New Yorkers since 1887. If these walls could talk, they’d swap stories about old-timey gangsters and Wall Street cretins chowing down on dry-aged beef and knocking back old-fashioneds while gossiping about everyone from Rudy Giuliani to Gisele Bündchen’s visits to the steakhouse’s Teutonic dining room. And while scores of high-profile athletes make the Luger’s pilgrimage every year, the walls would also probably have one thing to say about my lunch companion, who’s just ordered a rib eye, creamed spinach, and a crab cake while encouraging me to also throw in a shrimp cocktail:
That guy is fucking huge.
Ritchson, the 42-year-old actor and star of Amazon Prime Video's shoot-’em-up series Reacher, is roughly 230 pounds of eye-popping muscle, and cuts an imposing figure in any room he’s in. I meet him at the bar on the restaurant’s ground floor; he arrives 10 minutes early. As the host takes us upstairs to a corner table, the natural light of a sunny Williamsburg afternoon bends through the windows, casting him in a sort of angelic glow. Ritchson quite literally turns heads with every step. He's wearing a black Stone Island baseball hat low on his forehead; the brim gives him something to fidget with whenever he’s pondering his next word, but it can only do so much to conceal the six-foot-two behemoth who plays one of television’s most ruthlessly violent action stars.
“Yeah, it’s hard to hide,” he tells me. One of the major themes of Reacher—in which he plays the titular character Jack Reacher, an ex-military police major—is that trouble always finds him. I wonder aloud if Ritchson relates to that aspect of his character at all, especially as the show’s success has made him much more of a well-known public figure. “A hundred percent,” he answers instantly. “I’ve got a lot of stories.” Here he pauses for five seconds, internally debating whether to share this next part with someone he met 20 minutes ago.
“I caught a guy red-handed in a park one time. I was working out. It was so windy that the dust off the track was blowing in my eyes, so I couldn't face one direction. I just decided to do sprints one way and stay facing that way. I saw a guy come into the park, look around, and hover around my stuff: my keys, my wallet, my phone. He was about to rob me! And he did—took all my stuff. So, I just finished my sprint into the back of his head,” he says, miming the kind of forearm-shiver move the NFL has frowned on for decades. “That kind of stuff happens all the time.”
In part because his show has become a viewership magnet since it debuted in 2022, Ritchson feels like there’s some sort of weird target on his back. There are only two Reacher seasons available for streaming, with the third dropping on February 20, but everyone still seems to know who he is now. He points out that the show’s audience demographics are basically a 50-50 split between men and women, Democrats and Republicans. So when he has public run-ins, it’s not always dudes trying to punk him. One woman at Peter Luger is brave enough to come over and ask for a photo, bragging about how jealous her sister will be. Ritchson happily obliges and smiles afterwards about how frequently it happens.
It presents an interesting dichotomy, though. The man he plays on television despises most things about the modern age. Reacher has no fixed address, travels only with the clothes on his back, does not own a phone, and definitely would not take selfies with a stranger. That doesn’t mean the character is completely foreign to Ritchson. He and the fictional ass-kicker share a few things in common.
“Reacher and I are most similar in this way,” he begins. “Reacher leans in, right? He leans in to violence, he leans in to trouble, and I'm the same way. But in real life, it's hard to walk away unscathed.”
The main thing to know if you’ve never seen Reacher: It is bananas. The show is based on the Jack Reacher book series, created by the British author Lee Child, which consists of 29 novels and one short-story collection. Child published the first Jack Reacher book in 1997 after losing his job at the British television network ITV Granada; for the next 23 years, he began work on a new Reacher every year on the anniversary of his sacking. In 2020, after countless bestsellers, he announced he was retiring, although he’s still credited as a cowriter on new Reacher books alongside his brother Andrew Grant, who writes as Andrew Child.
There have been two Jack Reacher movies, in 2012 and 2016, both starring Tom Cruise, who doesn’t match the books’ physical description of Reacher. In The Midnight Line, the 23rd installment, Child describes Reacher’s fists as being the size of “Thanksgiving turkeys.” Child, who was involved in the audition process for the show and visits the set often, has never gotten an official measurement on Ritchson’s hands, but that’s okay. “I’ve shaken his hand and it was pretty impressive,” Child says. “That’s what we were looking for. I wasn’t interested in his dialogue or anything like that. I just wanted that first second that he’s onscreen: Does he have it or not? He nailed it.”
In the television version of the Reacher universe, there is seemingly a gun onscreen once per minute, and when they’re held by the opps, virtually all of the shots are misses. Like Reacher—who is adamant about people only calling him by his last name—most of his crew are also ex-military, so they’re deadly accurate with any sort of firearm. One character, a detective played by Malcolm Goodwin, takes someone out in season one with a sort of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar skyhook deployment of a rifle. Reacher shoots someone underwater. He kills a guy with a bone saw. He drowns someone in wet cement. This is a show where a man is castrated, forced to eat his own testicles, and nailed to a wall crucifixion-style (but not, to be clear, by Reacher.) It is a show where bad guys shoot up a funeral in broad daylight. Reacher both burns a man alive and strangles another with his own necktie.
All the while, he and his merry band of ethical killers execute impossible-to-believe escape moves. At the end of season two, Reacher saves one of his associates-slash-love-interests from falling out of a helicopter by pulling her back in with one arm. There’s a scene where a dozen bikers corner Reacher’s squad in a parking lot and they simply murder their way out. No one seems to notice. The same is true of when a quaint, residential home gets pipe-bombed and showered with bullets. Reacher always gets away, and at the end of each season, he packs up and leaves town when the job is done, a self-described hobo who goes wherever he’s needed.
The transient nature of his character is somewhat familiar for Ritchson. “The negative side is, does life imitate art? At least once a year, is he going to have to bust some huge scam?” Child asks rhetorically.
Born in North Dakota to a schoolteacher mother and a father who retired from the Air Force as a chief master sergeant, Ritchson’s family briefly moved to Illinois during his childhood before settling in Niceville, Florida, where he was classmates with the ghoulish politician Matt Gaetz, who has been accused (among other things) of paying for sex with a 17-year-old. The mere mention of Gaetz’s name puts a charge into Ritchson.
“That motherfucker. We are adversaries,” he sighs. “It's shocking to me that the panhandle of Florida continues to vote for somebody—knowing everything we know about him and the promises that he's made behind closed doors about pardoning certain criminals—he's just not a good dude! There's part of me that wants to get into politics to outdo somebody like him for good, and there's part of me that's like, I'm not duplicitous enough to succeed in politics. There are certain people that do a good job of staying true to who they are, but they're ineffective. I think Bernie Sanders is a hero. But it's like, what has he accomplished?”
These sorts of contemplative, nuanced admissions are the things that often surprise people about Ritchson. The show that made him a star is as macho as it gets. The sheer amount of weaponry in play makes it feel almost like pornography for right-wing Second Amendment types. And as a character, Reacher is tactically stoic, careful not to reveal any emotions that could come back to bite him. But the real Ritchson doesn’t fit that mold at all. He is thoughtful and inquisitive, complimenting my jacket and mixing in some questions about my own upbringing as we eat. He’s got a disarming pair of kind eyes that light up when he’s excited, and an unassailable charm. He’s prone to saying, “Dude!” when agreeing with something I say or “Yes and”-ing with his own point. Imagine if your sweetest childhood friend got jacked and made it big in Hollywood.
But unlike your stereotypical buff guy, Ritchson also possesses a deep vulnerability, and is extremely forthcoming about things like drug usage (“I think the most peaceful world would be one where everybody has tried mushrooms”), fatherhood, and a suicide attempt that he discussed at length in a 2024 Hollywood Reporter feature. On the drug front, he’s a big proponent of progressive therapeutic practices that utilize psilocybin as well as ketamine and MDMA, pointing out that MDMA therapy is one of the only proven treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder. He is not only an advocate, but a true MDMA success story. “My experience with it was out of desperation,” he says. “It was like, Well, I could kill myself at any point, so I might as well try everything. Truly, I felt a light switch come on. It was wildly healing.” When discussing the suicide attempt, he does so in a way that frames it as a win, rather than a near loss of life.
“I succeeded that day in one sense, because I did come out the other end of that a completely different person,” he reflects. “But I think, in a culture where we're afraid to talk about death or even use the word death, it’s necessary to understand our mortality. To become our highest selves, we have to put to death some part of our life, some part of who we are. I'm fortunate enough to have experienced that firsthand. I can attribute everything that's happened afterward to that moment. I think a lot of people are afraid to face that, or not aware that that has to happen.”
After the incident, he got a shoulder tattoo of a skull wearing a crown, typically a symbol of enduring might. It’s yet another stark reminder that Ritchson is not Reacher, a character who views homeownership—let alone permanent body ink—as too much of a commitment. Between liberally salting his steak and rolling up the sleeves of his expensive-looking gray James Perse sweater—unsheathing more tattoos and a Patek Phillippe Nautilus his wife bought him—the actor takes a moment to emphasize that the guy he portrays onscreen is just that, an act.
“People have this weird relationship with fictional characters, and sort of equate that to the real human being,” he says. “I don't have that problem, making that distinction. I get criticized a lot by Christians who are like, ‘How dare you have an unmarried sex scene on TV and then talk about Jesus?’ I'm sorry—I doubt that's going to be part of the conversation when I'm standing at the pearly gates!”
Ritchson is a devoted man of faith, but in that Hollywood Reporter story, he not only denounced the Catholic Church, he said the quiet part out loud regarding “cardinals, bishops, and priests being passed around with known pedophilic tendencies.” In a galaxy full of stars that are so guarded, so protective of their bottom line that they dare not say anything remotely controversial, Ritchson brings a refreshing lack of filter to each interview. His costar Maria Sten notices it on set, too, where Ritchson is not afraid to speak up when they’re filming a scene he finds particularly ridiculous and needs some tweaking.
“He says what he means and he means what he says, very much like Reacher in a lot of ways,” says Sten, who plays Neagley, Reacher’s savvy right-hand woman. “A lot of people try to sugarcoat things to make it sound pretty or correct. But, Reacher’s gonna Reacher and Alan’s gonna Alan.”
Now that Reacher has become, to use Sten’s words, a “massive juggernaut”—the type of project that makes its star forever synonymous with their character—it’s easy to say that Ritchson was destined for this role. But the hulking, prototypical action hero didn’t always see himself that way. Before Reacher, his most famous role was Thad Castle, the goofy linebacker on Spike TV’s raunchy football comedy Blue Mountain State. Being the streaming era’s answer to Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger—whom Ritchson will star alongside in an upcoming Christmas action movie—was never the plan for a guy who followed up Blue Mountain State with a few Ninja Turtles movies and a lead role in a SyFy death-race series called Blood Drive before getting his big break in his late 30s.
“I wanted to be a top comedic star,” Ritchson says of his early days, which included some Abercrombie modeling and a comet-like appearance on American Idol. “I was compared to Ryan Reynolds once. They're like, ‘You're a leading man, but funny. Ryan Reynolds is the only other guy in town doing it. You can pick up all the jobs he had!’" Reacher rarely gives him a chance to flex his sense of humor, but I can vouch for the fact that Ritchson is a barrel of laughs. Hilarious is the word Sten uses, telling me that most scenes they film for Reacher come with several blooper takes. Child calls Ritchson “very funny” and this triggers a memory of the first time they ever sat down with each other.
“His first question was, ‘So, Lee. Tell me how thrilled you were when you heard I’d agreed to play Reacher?’” the writer remembers. “That is dead on my own sardonic sense of humor. I came right back and said I was thrilled—especially when our first choice turned us down, and our second, and our third.”
The other thing that anyone who’s worked with Ritchson will tell you is how hard this guy grinds. Ritchson loathes the idea of phoning it in, instead choosing to pursue excellence in everything that he does. Cruise control and complacency are dirty words for him. As he’s spinning me a few yarns about various times he’s complained about something to the Reacher production crew, only for them to take his advice later and create a better product because of it, he does so with a discernible sense of pride, like a quarterback who audibled to a better play than the one his coach dialed up. Child summarizes it all quite well. “The title character in a big show like this is effectively the on-field captain. He sets the standard.”
Nick Santora, the writer and producer who developed Reacher for television, has had an extensive career in TV, working on heavy hitters like The Sopranos, Law & Order, and Prison Break. With over 20 years in the biz, Santora has dealt with hundreds of actors, and certainly not all of them get after it like Ritchson. “He will put in the long hours to learn every single line, to work on fight sequences, and so on,” Santora says over email. “You don't know an actor's work ethic until you are in the soup with them and, fortunately, we all get to work with someone who likes to work really hard too.”
With all of this now firmly in place—the star-making role on a show that’s already been renewed for a fourth season, a sterling reputation within the industry, a clear lane for him to be one of if not the action star of the 2020s—is Ritchson worried about being typecast? Does he fear a world where the only scripts that come across his desk require snapping somebody’s spinal cord? “Absolutely not,” he says, before laying out his reasoning. “It's my bread and butter now, it's fun, and I do think I'm one of the best at it.”
Becoming the best wasn’t so simple. An enormous part of playing Reacher is looking the part, and though Ritchson has always been in shape, that alone wouldn’t be enough to truly embody a cold-blooded killing machine. To use gym parlance, Ritchson was shredded, but he had to get swole. “I just built a gym in my house, and I worked my ass off,” he says of the initial Reacher training methods, which then led to more experimental measures.
“I got on TRT [testosterone replacement therapy] a month after we wrapped season one, and I did notice that it made maintaining those gains much, much easier. But I got there on my own. It wasn't until season two when I got a call from the studio that said, ‘We're not happy with your size.’ Bro! Do you know how confusing that was for me?” He pauses here for a second to acknowledge that women have it much worse when it comes to executives deciding what’s right and wrong with their bodies. “But I was kind of put in a tailspin. I was like, ‘Hold on. I'm in the best shape of my life. I'm the biggest I've ever been, and I'm being told it's not enough?’”
Ritchson insists on doing as many Reacher stunts as they’ll allow him to do, which can be grueling and involves jumping through a series of insurance hoops. The desire to do all the stunts, once again, comes from his inherent need for things to be the best. He voices some displeasure about a sequence in season two where, unbeknownst to him, they used a take of a stunt double running instead of him. This led to some online jabs about how Ritchson is a bad runner, made worse by his enhanced stature. “People equated my gain in size with the fact that I can't move, or I move like an ape,” he bemoans. "I'm like, ‘No, I'm a super-athletic dude! I know how to move. Race me right now, dude.’”
This, ultimately, is the thing about Ritchson. He doesn’t just want to excel, he needs to excel. Whether that means butting heads with directors he feels are ill-equipped to shoot action scenes, stressing over simultaneously trying to be the best dad for his three children and the best action star on TV, or plotting Reacher’s ascent higher into the American canon. “I want season 10 to be the best season we've ever had,” he declares. That is the Ritchson ethos, through and through. Having dined with him for well over an hour, this partially contextualizes his playful worry about Peter Luger, which he saw was eviscerated by a New York Times review five years ago. He’s not satisfied with anything less than the best, which is why, after lunch, I purposefully fail to mention that I’m heading toward the G train, New York’s least reliable form of transportation. Instead, I just say I’m going to take “the subway,” leaving Ritchson standing on the street, patiently waiting for his next adventure.
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Ashley Markle
Styled by Amanda Pham
Grooming by Kat Crisp
Tailoring by Ksenia Golub
Set design by Bailey Brown
