Jack Reacher is always the biggest guy in the room, but he’s also the smartest guy in the room. As an actor, how do you tap into that intelligence? It’s one thing to be big on camera, but another thing to be smart on camera.
Yeah. I tap right into Nick Santora’s brain, our showrunner. It’d be really nice if I could just take credit for all the witty, wonderfully intelligent, verbose bits of dialogue and exposition I’ve got to say on the show, but the writing is so good. Nick Santora, our showrunner, understands who Reacher is and the humor of the show, how dark to make the show or Reacher. He understands the tone perfectly and I just have to get out of the way.
We’ve got two great writers involved in this. We’ve got Lee Child, who really set the stage, and then we’ve got Nick Santora and his team of writers. Just it’s really hard to screw it up. I just have to say what they give me to say. It’s so good.
To readers and viewers, Jack Reacher is the stuff of legend. He’s Hercules, he’s Gilgamesh, he’s Paul Bunyan. But you can’t really play a legend. You’ve got to play a man first, so how do you bring humanity to a character who everybody else sees him as this larger-than-life figure?
Oh, and that is the great work. That is the work. How do we humanize somebody who’s mythologically large in our minds and in the books? I think there’s something very human driving him, this undeniable pursuit of righteousness in his own way. He’s got his own rules, his own set of laws, but there’s something very human about his desire to see right done and wrong eliminated in the world. I think as long as I remain faithful to that desire, then I’m connecting to his humanity.
One of the potential downsides of each season being a different book is that viewers will wonder what happened to supporting characters from a previous season. Because I know Jack Reacher and his world’s important to you, would you ever be open to a season that breaks canon a little bit to bring back Roscoe or Finlay? Or are you more of a purist?
I would, for sure. I would be a huge fan of that. I think we should. I think we should at some point. They were just too good. We’re building a world here, and although this is an anthology, to be able to remind the audience that this is a real journey that he’s taken and there are some people that are still there, I think could be a lot of fun. Yeah, I hope we can do that at some point.