‘Reacher’ author didn’t know if show could adapt Paulie from book

When the main character trait of the titular hero in Reacher is that he’s just really freakin’ huge, how do you challenge him physically? That’s exactly what author Lee Child was thinking about as he wrote his seventh book, Persuader, upon which season 3 of the Amazon series is based.

“As you know, Reacher is a big, tough guy,” the author tells Entertainment Weekly. “He can take anybody on, but I wanted to have him face an opponent that would be a real problem. So I dreamed up this huge, steroid-filled, bodybuilding, seven-foot guy, big enough to really be worrisome for Reacher. That’s easy to do as a book writer because you just type different words — costs me nothing, but for TV, they actually had to find an actor that could be that guy, a foot taller than Alan Ritchson, a hundred pounds heavier.”

Ritchson stars in the Amazon action series as the massive, former military vagabond who travels from town to town, fighting crime whenever it finds him (and it finds him a lot). Written in the books as 6 ft. 5 inches and weighing 250 lbs, finding an actor who could embody the near-mythically sized man was no easy feat. Thankfully, Ritchson doesn’t just look the part — for every powerful punch, he’s also got the perfect delivery of Reacher’s deadpan humor and no-nonsense dialogue. He’s also not hard on the eyes, making it easy for him to break hearts wherever he goes. But finding someone even bigger than Ritchson who could go toe-to-toe with him was something that Child feared was impossible.

“Where are we going to find that guy?” the author remembers wondering as the show began casting season 3. “That was the thing that I thought, ‘How are they going to do this?’ It was literally an international search. We finally found him in the Netherlands and he looks the part, he plays the part, he is a scary dude.”

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That “dude” is none other than Olivier Richters, a Dutch bodybuilder and actor literally known as the Dutch Giant. Standing at 7 ft. 2 inches, he towers over Ritchson — a very rare sight. Richters joins the series as Paulie, a bodyguard in the criminal organization of which Reacher goes undercover in during season 3. Suffice to say, Paulie is going to cause some, well, big problems for Reacher.

“The thing that I love most is that Reacher is used to winning with the first punch, and he really puts his all into it,” Child says. “He hits Paulie, and no reaction whatsoever. And Reacher’s face is like, ‘What?!’ He can’t believe it. And Alan captures that perfectly.”

Book readers know where this is heading, but Child can’t wait for viewers to see the Reacher-Paulie conflict play out this season. “The Paulie thing, this huge bodyguard, it’s obvious from the start that Reacher is going to have to fight him at some point,” Child says. “And it doesn’t happen straight away. We wait for it and we wait for it, but we know it’s going to come, and so the tension and suspense on that is huge. What is going to be the outcome of that? Because the guy’s genuinely scary.”

Reacher season 3 premieres Thursday, Feb. 20, on Amazon.