ALAN RITCHSON GOES BIG-FIT AT ANY AGE

Hollywood told him actors don't break past 30. But he kept working, and at 41, after decades of near misses and tiny roles, the Reacher star is busting out.

- LAUREN LARSON

I meet the 41-year-old in the basement of a house where he’s doing our photo shoot, halfway between Atlanta and his log cabin in Jasper, Georgia. A large, plasteredover beam drops down from the basement’s ceiling and everyone else moves under it easily. But whenever Ritchson approaches the beam, I feel the same bolt of stress as when a particularly large truck is about to pass under a particularly low overpass. His swoop of coppery hair barely clears the beam each time.

He seems taller than his 1.91m frame. (That’s more than two metres on Hinge.) Perhaps it’s because of the size of the rest of him: with even the slightest movement, at least a dozen muscles visibly activate. Or perhaps it’s because his identity has been so fused with that of former military police officer Jack Reacher, whom Ritchson plays on Amazon Studio’s hit series Reacher.

The character is famously enormous. His creator, author Lee Child, dryly explains that Reacher follows a long tradition of male writers making their heroes one inch taller than they are— Child is six-foot-four (1.93m). Size is so central to the character that when noted short king Tom Cruise played Reacher in a film adaptation, he was met with skepticism. Child says, “There was a huge amount of pushback from the book fans and so on, saying, No, we need a man mountain here.”

Ritchson makes everyone and everything around him seem dainty. When he’s done posing for photos, we adjourn to a den and squeeze onto a slightly-too-small love seat. On his left wrist, he wears a thick Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Offshore watch. On his right wrist, two silver bracelets, one sparkling with gemstones, move fluidly over a tattoo of a lotus flower. Around his neck, he wears a silver chain with two rings. So bejewelled, he toes a dangerous sartorial line between rock-star pastor and off-duty celebrity, but his face—the cologne-ad glower, the total symmetry, the strong cleft chin— marks him as the latter.