On screen, Tom Cruise may look larger than life, but if you could ever get him to stop running and measure his height, you might find that he’s one of those Napoleonic actors who’s shorter in person than he looks on celluloid.

The movie magic of shoe lifts and low-angle shots enables Cruise to fill the screen the way Alan Ritchson, star of the current “Reacher” series on Prime Video, fills the room in real life.

Cruise’s action bona fides in the “Mission: Impossible” film series speak for themselves, but the actor is 5 foot 7, and this is part of the reason why loyal readers of the “Jack Reacher” book series — written by Jim Grant under the pen name Lee Child — were taken aback by his casting in the two “Jack Reacher” movies.

Cruise’s version of Reacher comes across more as a guy who’s underestimated because of his size. Ritchson, by contrast, offers a more book-accurate portrayal of Reacher, the imposing, musclebound former military policeman.

Don’t ask Ritchson to compare himself to Cruise, though, because he’s never actually watched the “Jack Reacher” movies.

In a 2022 interview with The Wrap, Ritchson explained that he deliberately avoided seeing “Jack Reacher” and its sequel, “Jack Reacher: Never Go Back,” for fearing of Cruise’s performance rubbing off on his own somehow:

“Those were just movies that I missed, and when I got involved [in the show], I just decided I didn’t want to risk picking up any of the choices that he made.

And it would be easy to do because Tom is a legend, and I grew up watching him. I revere his work. I think it would be inevitable that I’d try and steal something of his because he’s so good.”

‘He was extremely tall’

Paramount Pictures

On the one hand, saying he’s never seen the “Jack Reacher” movies serves a practical PR purpose in that it enables Alan Ritchson to diplomatically sidestep any potential criticisms of Tom Cruise, praising him as an actor while pleading ignorance to the specifics of his performance as Reacher.

On the other hand, it’s also very understandable, from a pure acting perspective, that Ritchson might want to avoid the chance of him inadvertently adopting any of Cruise’s physical or vocal mannerisms as Reacher.

We hear about this all the time with other actors who have stepped into a new version of a role someone else inhabited before them. While “Reacher” isn’t intended to be Shakespeare, acting in general often involves mimesis, a broad term that MasterClass defines as the “imitation or mimicry through which artists portray and interpret the world.”

Sometimes, this mimicry can happen on an unconscious level, but Ritchson seems to recognize that he isn’t there to unconsciously imitate Tom Cruise; he’s there to deliver his own unique portrayal of Jack Reacher.

The first “Jack Reacher” film came in 2012, and that same year, Lee Child described Reacher as follows in the novel “A Wanted Man”:

“He was one of the largest men she had ever seen outside the NFL. He was extremely tall, and extremely broad, and long-armed, and long-legged. The lawn chair was regular size, but it looked tiny under him. It was bent and crushed out of shape. His knuckles were nearly touching the ground.”

Suffice it to say, a knuckle-dragging Jack Reacher who could stand shoulder to shoulder with NFL players isn’t what moviegoers got with Tom Cruise. With Alan Ritchson, however, they’re able to see a Reacher who is more authentic to Child’s original vision — and Ritchson’s, as an actor.