Alan Ritchson Suffered A Real Injury During The Reacher Season 3 Finale

I'm not saying that Jack Reacher is Batman, but it is interesting that the third season of "Reacher" pulls the same trick the third movie of the "Dark Knight" trilogy pulled in 2012. After two seasons/movies of the hero easily beating up every henchman that crosses their path, "The Dark Knight Rises" and "Reacher" season 3 both throw in a type of bad guy we've never seen him fight before: a guy who is just, like, really strong.

For Batman this bad guy was Bane (Tom Hardy), a massive tank of a man who literally broke the bat's back halfway through the movie. For Jack Reacher, this guy was Paulie (Olivier Richters), the only character in the entire show who's ever made Reacher feel small. Coming in at 7'2" and 330 lbs, Paulie shocked viewers earlier in the season when he easily smacked Reacher to the ground. For the first time in possibly the entire series, Reacher had a foe he wasn't sure he could handle. 

This all culminated in a climactic fight sequence in the season 3 finale, "Unfinished Business." Or rather, it was three climactic fight sequences strung together, as Reacher and Paulie's fight to the death takes them from the barn to the sea to the security gate outside Beck's mansion. Reacher eventually gets the upper hand, but it takes a very, very long time before he can defeat Paulie for good. As Reacher's actor, Alan Ritchson, described it in a recent interview, "You just watch Reacher get ragdolled for five minutes straight." 

Ritchson was fully on board with all of this; he's said in previous interviews that he thinks it's best if audiences don't believe that his character's invincible. ("What kind of fun is that for audiences?" he argued.) The only problem was that he insisted on doing one particularly dangerous stunt himself, and he knocked himself unconscious. 

As Ritchson explained, "I was like, 'I want the audience to know that I'm doing this for us. I'm taking one for Reacher and we're all in this together,' and so I wanted the camera to come up and just stay on my face the whole time while I get smashed through a table on the barn floor." The approach clearly paid off in the scene itself, but in hindsight Ritchson probably should've just let the stunt double handle it, as the crew itself urged him to do. 

"I was like, 'I'm doing it. We're doing it,'" Ritchson explained. "And I won. Reluctantly, they're like, 'You better not die because we said you're going to die, and we tried to warn you.'" As he explained further:

"I got picked up and we worked out the camera thing a few times and he slammed me through the table so hard, I went through it into the seventh circle of hell. And I woke up a day and a half later. When I came to, I had to tell my kids that I felt great, because they were on set, and I didn't want them to think that like, dad died and was going to not be okay. It was the worst few minutes of my life."

It gets worse, though: this stunt was early into the big fight sequence, which took three full weeks to film. "That was one, three-second beat in 28 minutes of content, just to give you an example of what my life was like for those three weeks," Ritchson explained. "It was a hoot." Thankfully, Ritchson was okay in the end, and able to return for more "Reacher" action.