How Reacher’s Alan Ritchson Helped Maxwell Jenkins Prepare To Play Young Jack

Season 1 of “Reacher” was all about absurdly fun action, with Alan Ritchson’s itinerant hero often taking on entire gangs of enemies in brutal fight scenes that took months of preparation. But that didn’t mean the eight episodes were devoid of any character development or exploration. Reacher reveals small details about his life throughout, whether it’s telling Willa Fitzgerald’s Roscoe about his experiences as a soldier in Baghdad, or reliving memories of his younger self hanging out with his brother, Joe.

In those flashbacks, Maxwell Jenkins portrays young Reacher as he stands up to bullies and generally projects the same quiet strength as Ritchson. And that was by design. Speaking to Pop Culturalist, the young actor said:

“Probably the biggest help in preparing for ‘Reacher’ was talking to [showrunner] Nick Santora and Alan Ritchson who plays Jack Reacher. Because I was Reacher in flashbacks, it was really important to be in support of Alan’s creation. So we discussed the physicality of Reacher a lot. We concluded that Reacher was like a crocodile. He sits, listens, waits, and only moves when the time is right.”

But Jenkins’ prep went beyond chatting to Ritchson about Reacher’s physicality. The 17-year-old also revealed that he watched dailies of the show, alongside Ritchson’s audition videos, and tried to “study the way he moved and the expressions and gestures he used.” After mixing those gestures into his own performance, the final piece of the puzzle was watching Lee Child interviews for some “background context.”