By Marie-Louise Gumuchian
LONDON (Reuters) – Television series “Reacher”, based on the best-selling Jack Reacher books, returns for season three this week with the titular character going undercover.
The show, one of Prime Video’s most popular releases, stars Alan Ritchson as the former U.S. military police major turned drifter, a character British author Lee Child first introduced in his 1997 debut novel “Killing Floor”.
Child has published 29 Jack Reacher books in total, the latter ones with his brother Andrew, and serves as an executive producer on the “Reacher” show.
In an interview with Reuters, Child spoke about season three, an adaptation of his seventh Reacher book “Persuader”, and what his famous hero means to him.
Below are excerpts edited for length and clarity.
Q: How would you describe “Reacher” season three?
Child: “It’s about the feel and it’s about the emotional core and the fear that we feel on behalf of Reacher because he’s undercover, he’s alone…He’s entirely isolated, literally on a promontory in the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded on every side by hostility.”
Q: How do you decide which book to adapt for the show?
Child: “It’s a random choice in a way…it’s like a reader can pick up any of the books and be entirely satisfied…They all stand alone. So in a sense it can be random, but we try to impose some kind of logic to it, in that season one was really about Reacher’s emotional roots with his real family. Then season two was his emotional roots with his professional family. And season three, therefore, we can launch him on his own, the classic lone wolf Reacher and ‘Persuader’ was a great story for that.”
Q: What does Jack Reacher mean to you?
Child: “A character like that I wrote absolutely personally, it was written for one person, which was me. I was losing my job. He was losing his job in the army. I was worried. He was not worried. It was about wish fulfilment. What would it be like to not be worried about things, to not be afraid of things, to not be nervous? What would it be like to be utterly confident in your life? And I think that’s something that we all can respond to on a very personal level.”
Q: Given the long list of Jack Reacher books, do you see scope for growth for the TV series as well?
Child: “Theoretically, we could do every book…and then write original stories. Historically, that’s unlikely. Not many things run for 30 plus years, but there’s still plenty of stuff we can use. And there are spin-off possibilities, too…There’s plenty of fertile ground there. I just feel like it’s a runaway horse and I’m trying to cling on and ride it as far as I can.”
(Reporting by Marie-Louise Gumuchian; Editing by Frances Kerry)
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