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Reacher star Alan Ritchson has recalled the injury he sustained on set of the action-packed TV series that made it difficult for him to ‘breathe’ or ‘sit’, explaining that he managed to power through.
The new Amazon Prime Video drama follows the titular character, a former US Army military police officer, as he wanders into a rural town in Georgia and becomes embroiled in a web of crime, with the story based on the first book in Lee Child’s novel series, Killing Floor.
As can be expected, there are a lot of heavy-duty stunts on the show, which are expertly enacted by stunt performers and actors in the cast.
While speaking to Metro.co.uk and other press, Ritchson admitted that while they were ‘safe’, you ‘cannot tell a story like this without some bumps and bruises’, going into detail on one particular injury that sounds like it was agonising.
When asked whether there were any injuries on set, the 39-year-old emphasised that he is ‘only as good as the actors across from me’, praising the ‘phenomenal’ people he worked with on the programme, including the stunt team.
Ritchson described Buster Reeves, the supervising stunt coordinator and fight designer, as one of the ‘best in the world’, explaining that because Reeves’ style is ‘so specific’, it took him a while to ‘deconstruct’ his own way of fighting.
‘It took a long time to sort of deconstruct my fighting style which is more of a broad, brawler energy and Reacher’s much more specific than that, a little more like a neurosurgeon. So we had to just clean up a lot of my foibles,’ the Blue Mountain State star said.
‘So once we stripped my style down to the basics and rebuilt, then it was just months of training, and that’s going to take its toll on the body.’
One scene took a particularly large toll on Ritchson, as he shared that he ended up tearing an oblique.
‘There was a fight where I was elbowing the hell out of somebody and I tore an oblique, and that’s a difficult one to… you can’t breathe, you can’t sit, stand, there’s just no position to be in where it doesn’t get you, but we fought through,’ the Smallville actor stated.
Another memorable fight that Ritchson performed was, he admitted, his ‘scariest moment’ while filming, as he feared slipping from a significant height while wearing shoes that had little grip.
He explained that for this particular scene, he insisted on doing it himself, as he wanted the audience to ‘be able to experience the best version of these fights’, as opposed to noticing when the actor had been swapped for a stunt double.
‘I had the opportunity to leap across a fire escape but because the action was all sort of continuous, there were no rigs or anything,’ he outlined.
‘I have no fear of heights, I’m game for all this stuff, but I had these dress shoes on, and it’s the kind of thing normally you’d do in some sneakers with some grip, and I not only had dress shoes, but they had a heel on the shoe.’
Joking that he was ‘dressed for church’, he added: ‘I’m leaping off this balcony, pretty far below is some concrete and I was just worried I was going to hook my heel going over.
‘It didn’t happen thankfully, I’m here to tell the tale, but that I think was the scariest moment for me all season and we got through it and I think it’s one of the best fights, I think the fans are going to love it.’
During a recent interview with Metro.co.uk, author Child opened up about the criticism from some fans when Tom Cruise was cast as Reacher in the two feature films, as Reacher is described in the books as being of a greater height than the actor.
He emphasised that the character has to ‘scare people’, which can be more easily achieved ‘with one glance of this huge animal rather than a normal-sized actor’.
Reacher is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video.
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