Reacher’s cast just got bigger

Reacher

(Image credit: Amazon Prime Video)

Reacher is big – in more ways than one. The titanic giant of a character has been a huge success for Amazon Prime Video in his first two seasons by anchoring a no-frills, action-packed show.

Amazon has boasted about its success, so we know it’s getting at least a couple more seasons, and one major casting update has just set tongues wagging in a big way ahead of its third outing.

Alan Ritchson is no small man, successfully embodying Jack Reacher’s size and power in a way that Tom Cruise sadly never could, but in the novel Persuader, which looks like it’s being adapted for the show’s third season, an even bigger threat appears.

Paul “Paulie” Masserella is a feature in that book, and memorable because of how he’s described as specifically being way more massive than even Reacher:

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“He was a very big guy. I stand six feet five inches tall and I have to center myself quite carefully to walk through a standard thirty-inch doorway. This guy was at least six inches taller than me and probably ten inches wider across the shoulders. He probably outweighed me by two hundred pounds. Maybe by more. “

That’s a tall order, literally, when you’re a casting director, but it looks like Reacher has managed to find its Paulie in the form of Olivier Richters, an absolutely massive actor whose nickname says it all: “The Dutch Giant”.

This news was greeted with total awe by a whole range of observers, and prompted basically everyone on social media to make the same joke about Reacher casting an even bigger man.

For some this has taken the form of mock amazement, like one X account user who wrote, “There’s someone….bigger than Reacher??”

Others have gone more analytical, with another X poster running the numbers for people: “This is how you do it. Get a guy who is 7’2 345 to raise the stakes…for reference Alan Ritchson is 6’3 240ish. Gonna be a real fun third season”.

They’re worth focusing on, though, because the key detail really is that Olivier Richters is over seven feet tall – so he’ll authentically tower over Reacher in just the way that their various scenes together demand.

What we don’t have to go with this casting news is anything firm on a release date for the next season of Reacher – but you can spend the time before we hear more just dreaming of the fights that these two massive blokes will cook up.