Jai Courtney has spoken about his War Machine co-star Alan Ritchson, who beat him to the lead role in Reacher.
Ritchson has played the muscular titular character in all three seasons of Prime Video’s action series, which are based on the collection of novels from Lee Child.
The author’s work was previously adapted into a pair of films with Tom Cruise in the lead role, with Courtney appearing as Charlie in 2012’s Jack Reacher.
In an interview with Forbes, Courtney shared that he had auditioned for the role of Reacher in the Prime Video series, adding that he held no grudges towards Ritchson for beating him to the role.
“I’ve seen the show, and I remember when that was casting, I was like, ‘Wait, I’m big enough to play Jack Reacher,’ and they were like, ‘No, that’s too close to home,’ which was a bummer at the time. I never got [a] look in,” he recalled.
“Alan’s great in that, and he’s great in War Machine. I admire that dude and what he’s doing. It’s weirdly cool to see big, burly blokes getting roles because there was such a fear for a while… He’s getting a chance to do that with a lot of the work he’s setting up, so props to him.”
Ritchson, who has also starred in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, recently shared that he was knocked unconscious while filming a scene for the third season finale of Reacher, saying he went into the “seventh circle of hell”.
“I [got] the bright idea to shoot a stunt in a way… So I wanted the camera to come up and just stay on my face the whole time while I get smashed through a table on the barn floor,” he recalled.
“Everybody was like, ‘You’re going to get killed and we’re not going to do that because it’s going to hurt you too bad.’ And so we’re going to do it with a stuntman and a camera on the floor. And I was like, ‘No.'”
Source: digitalspy.com