Reacher's Alan Ritchson Tried Channeling Kevin Costner In His First Audition (And Blew It)

For fans of Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels, Alan Ritchson might be the perfect on-screen version of the retired military policeman, but it took a hell of a lot for Amazon to cast him in their streaming series. In fact, Ritchson was initially passed over by Amazon for "Reacher," only getting the job after a second audition and several meetings with producers.

All of that seems strange in light of the fact that "Reacher" broke Amazon streaming records and topped the Nielsen charts upon its debut in 2022. Not only that, fans responded positively to Ritchson himself. After Tom Cruise failed to embody the imposing physicality of Child's massive protagonist in two movies, Ritchson finally delivered a believably hefty Jack Reacher. But there was more to the character than Ritchson's 235-pound frame.

Reacher posed a challenge for both the writers and Ritchson, due to the fact that he's famously taciturn in the books, with the line "Reacher said nothing" becoming somewhat of a catchphrase among aficionados of the novels. This, as you might expect, was part of the problem when it came to Ritchson's first audition. The show's producers provided a scene which involved very little dialogue, leaving the "Titans" star to figure out how to portray the laconic bruiser without having any significant lines. And the method he used to get around that particular issue didn't exactly go over well.

When Alan Ritchson was cast as Jack Reacher, it was all down to a two-second clip that impressed Lee Child, who serves as executive producer on "Reacher." But in order to get to that point, Ritchson had to go through a protracted audition process that began with him inventing some novel methods to tackle the lack of dialogue in his first audition.

Ritchson appears to have recalled this audition differently on two separate occasions. Speaking to Empire, the leading man remembered there being a "four-page interrogation scene, where Reacher doesn't say anything," prompting the actor to ask, "How do I make this interesting?" His answer was to try "to channel 'Waterworld,' where the guy gets on the boat with Kevin Costner and he's really twitchy and super high-energy and Kevin Costner is kind of dry." That would suggest he was trying to emulate Costner's stoic energy.

But on the Inside of You podcast, Ritchson recalled actually trying to channel the "twitchy" guy — a drifter played by Kim Coates — telling host Michael Rosenbaum:

"I was like, 'it's gotta have some energy,' and so I was channeling the guy from 'Waterworld' who's like 'Gimme the paper, gimme the paper.' [...] I was trying to channel that guy, the 'Gimme the paper' guy. In my mind I'm imagining this guy trying to just generate some inner something, and they hated it."

Rather than trying to recreate Costner's stillness, then, it seems Ritchson was attempting to generate some inner kineticism that would translate on-screen by mimicking the "twitchy" guy from "Waterworld." Either way, none of it worked the first time around, which is fine because he eventually landed the part. He's since brought some of his "Reacher" muscle to "Fast X" — and all without any twitchy energy in sight.