Alan Ritchson Has A Couple Of Specific Stunts On His Reacher Wish List

Say what you will about the man, but Jack Reacher sure knows how to punch bad people real good. "Reacher" itself is no slouch when it comes to adapting the sanguinary action in Lee Child's source material for the small screen. There's rarely an episode of the Prime Video series where its namesake (Alan Ritchson) doesn't put his distinctive fighting style to use, wielding his elbows like multipurpose weapons the way John Wick deploys his guns. (Is "Elbow-fu" an actual term? Because it should be.)

To their credit, the "Reacher" writers do their darndest to vary the environments when it comes to the show's altercations. Over its first two seasons, the series has seen Reacher come to blows with folks everywhere from prison bathrooms to fire escapes, vast warehouses filled with smashy things that come in handy when you need to kill some henchmen, bars, parking lots, and even a construction site with some fortuitously placed cinder blocks and wet concrete slabs. It can start to feel a little like that scene in "Galaxy Quest" where Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver have to navigate a hallway inexplicably full of giant pounding metal crunchers, but that's just an extension of the self-aware levity that makes "Reacher" such prime pulpy entertainment.

Ritchson, for his part, takes pride in doing as many of his stunts on the show as possible (even those that technically aren't stunts yet somehow end with him bleeding all the same). Verily, he's yet to go to the same extreme as the man who played Jack Reacher on the big screen before him, Tom Cruise, in that regard. Still, if Ritchson gets to perform some of the "Reacher" stunts on his wish list, it may only be a matter of time before he, too, starts riding motorcycles off cliffs.

With all due respect to Christopher McQuarrie's fiercely rewatchable "Jack Reacher," Ritchson handily wins the contest for playing the best Jack Reacher between him and Cruise. Be that as it may, Ritchson assuredly has nothing but respect for some of the wilder stunts Cruise has performed over the years, particularly the white-knuckle halo jump from "Mission: Impossible — Fallout." Speaking to ScreenRant, Ritchson confirmed he would love to do a skydiving sequence of his own, preferably one that involves Reacher clocking goons on the way down. Here's how he described his personal bucket list of stunts he's itching to execute:

"Oh, dude. Yeah. Well, some good motorcycle stunts, I would love. I like to ride. I'd also like to do, like, aerial fights. Like, aerial skydiving fights. That would be the icing on the cake for me."

With his exceptionally beefy build, Ritchson wouldn't need to leap out of a plane to efficiently lay the smackdown on some hapless goons. Still, a "20,000-foot piledriver," as ScreenRant put it, would be quite the spectacle. "A 20,000-foot! Exactly!" said Ritchson, laughing. "Just don't be the guy who lands on the bottom, and you live!" Jack Reacher himself has fought evil-doers in just about every moving vehicle there is in Child's original novels (airplanes included), so now it's on showrunner Nick Santora to find a way to make it happen in season 3.

"Reacher" is streaming on Prime Video.