Jack Ryan: How "dead" franchise became a TV blockbuster
Jack Ryan is back. Almost five years since the character's last big-screen outing – 2014's Chris Pine-starrer Shadow Recruit – Tom Clancy's CIA hero is heading to television, or more specifically to Amazon Prime Video, for a new eight-part series.
Cast in the title role of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan is John Krasinski, the former star of The Office now red-hot after the one-two punch of his surprise metamorphosis into an action hero for the Michael Bay-produced 13 Hoursand the wild success of his directorial effort A Quiet Place.
"I had to do a huge physical transformation for 13 Hours," Krasinski tells Digital Spy, two weeks before flying out to Bogotá, Colombia to start work on the already-greenlit second season of Jack Ryan.
"I'm happy to admit it was a huge physical transformation!" he says. "It wasn't even close to what I looked like before."
Though he insists he "never wanted to run away from" his role as romantic hero Jim Halpert ("I'm pretty sure, at the end of my career, most people will be like 'Oh yeah, Jim from The Office' and that's an honour."), Krasinski admits he was hungry to try "new things" after nine years on the NBC sitcom.
"I saw a small window of opportunity – if I didn't do it now, I don't know when else I would do it."
At the same time as Krasinski was contemplating the next stage in his career, big name TV producer Carlton Cuse (Lost, Bates Motel) and colleague Graham Roland (Lost, Prison Break) were looking for a star to front their Jack Ryan series – a project that had been in development since early 2015.
"Paramount was done with making feature films, after Shadow Recruit," says Cuse. "They thought the franchise was dead. And they were probably right as it related to feature films.
[Above: Chris Pine in 2014's Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit]
"I think it would've been hard to make another two-hour Jack Ryan movie that would really revitalise the franchise. But the idea of doing an eight-hour version for television allowed us to expand the notion of what the franchise was, and what it could be."
Clancy's series of novels featuring Ryan began with 1984's The Hunt for Red October, charting the character's exploits as he rose up the ranks from lowly CIA analyst to, eventually, President of the United States.
Related: Jack Ryan TV series won't feature Tom Clancy's other hero John Clark
A string of films based on the books – starring, variously, Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Pine – were released sporadically between 1990 and 2014. But unlike those movies, the new Amazon series is not based on any one novel, instead inserting Clancy's characters – including Ryan and his mentor James Greer (played here by The Wire's Wendell Pierce) into an original story.
"We tried to adapt a book," executive producer / writer Roland reveals. "We spent about a month on it that spring of 2015 after we took the project on." But it quickly become apparent to him and Cuse that Clancy's novels are "geopolitical thrillers of their time", explaining that "trying to take a book that had been written 30 years ago and translate it to today was just not going to work".
Having decided on an origin story that would chart Ryan's journey from CIA desk jockey to field agent, they now needed an actor to play Ryan who could tick "a ton of boxes" – they needed someone who would be believable action hero, but also radiated charm and, crucially, intelligence.
Enter Krasinski. "John was somebody who immediately bubbled to the top of our minds," Cuse says. "He has that everyman quality, he's also a really smart guy - he went to Brown University...
"But also, the journey for the character of Jack was parallel to the one that John was trying to take as an actor. He didn't want to be perceived as just 'the funny, romantic guy from The Office', he wanted to add this whole other dimension, that he could be a more traditional leading man in drama."
The first eight episodes of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan will see Krasinski's righteous hero (called a "self-righteous boy scout" by another character in the first episode) come under fire as he works to uncover a terrorist plot in the Middle East, his strong moral fibre "constantly tested" by "amoral, or sometimes immortal… external forces".
The second season will be a political thriller that sees Ryan confront the forces in power in a dangerous regime in South America. "We see each season as like a book in a novel series," explains Cuse. "The characters of Jack Ryan and Jim Greer carry forward, but the story otherwise is wholly different.
"[Season two is] a very different environment and a very different story, but still following these two central characters on another adventure."
"That was one of the main reasons for signing on to the show is when they pitched it to me," says Krasinski. "Maybe movies isn't the best place for Jack Ryan, because it's only two hours and Tom Clancy's books are so rich with detail.
"Long-form television, where you have eight parts to deal with the story... it's actually more like the book experience."
Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan is available now on Amazon Prime Video.
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