Although Jack Reacher isn’t easy to defeat, Alan Ritchson is only human.
The Reacher star recently revealed that he was knocked unconscious while filming a fight scene for the Season 3 finale of his Prime Video series, which is now available to stream on the platform.
“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,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “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.”
Ritchson noted he filmed the scene after a “huge fight” with his team, during which they told him, “‘you’re going to die, and we tried to warn you.’”
“The whole point is you just watch Reacher get ragdolled for five minutes straight,” he explained. “And I was like, ‘This is fun. I like that this is the idea for everybody right now.’ And I get the bright idea to shoot a stunt in a way, because 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.”
Reacher
Ritchson continued, “Everybody was like, ‘You’re going to get killed and we’re not going to do that because it’s going to hurt you too bad.’ And so we’re going to do it with a stuntman and a camera on the floor.’ And I was like, ‘No.’”
The actor said it took “three weeks” to film the fight sequence, adding: “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. It was a hoot.”
