ACCIDENTAL ACTION HERO
Actor John Krasinksi on becoming Jack Ryan
In a matter of days, the CIA analyst has gone from crunching numbers behind a desk to boarding a last-minute flight to Yemen, where he’s expected to help catch an international terrorist. It’s a good thing he’s an action hero—even if he doesn’t realise it yet.
Created by author Tom Clancy in 1984, the character Jack Ryan has appeared in 20 books and five film adaptations starring the likes of Harrison Ford, Alec Baldwin, Ben Affleck, and most recently Chris Pine as the marine-turned-wall Street stockbroker-turned-cia analystturned-operative (turnedpresident, depending on how far you’ve read). “What?! There’s other people who’ve done this role? That’s unacceptable, I quit,” jokes John Krasinski, 38, the star of Amazon’s new series Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan (premiering on Aug. 31). Amazon clearly believes in the series, giving it a Season 2 renewal before Season 1 has even debuted. Coming off the streaming service’s success with the Golden Globe– winning The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, Jack Ryan will serve as a cornerstone of Amazon’s next round of original series, which also includes the Julia Roberts–led Homecoming.
Sitting in downtown Manhattan in early July, Krasinski—best known for playing Jim Halpert, the king of the reaction shot, on The Office— is coming off one of the best years of his career. The Boston native directed and starred in the critically acclaimed A Quiet Place, which also starred his wife, Emily Blunt. “I don’t think I would have gotten A Quiet Place without Jack Ryan,” Krasinski says, reflecting on his recent success.
It was during preproduction on the new series that producers Brad Fuller and Andrew Form asked if the father of two would be interested in starring in A Quiet Place, but Krasinski says he was too scared of genre movies. “They’re like, ‘It’s about a family that can’t talk, and you have to figure out why.’ And I was like, ‘Dammit, that’s the best one-liner I’ve ever heard,’ ” he says with a laugh. Krasinski then persuaded them to let him rewrite, direct and star in the film, which he began working on just five days after he wrapped Season 1 of Jack Ryan. Now, four months after A Quiet Place hit cinemas, Krasinski is finally able to talk about life as an almost action hero. (He won’t accept the title just yet.) “Let’s be honest, I know I can’t be Superman and I know I can’t be Iron Man,” Krasinski
says. “So Jack Ryan sort of becomes the guy that maybe, if you work hard and dedicate yourself, you could be.”
That Everyman quality is one of the things that attracted showrunners Carlton Cuse ( Lost) and Graham Roland ( Fringe) to both the character and Krasinski. “There’s a relatability about Jack Ryan that you don’t find in the Jason Bournes or the James Bonds,” Roland says. Unlike other wellknown heroes, Jack Ryan doesn’t wear a cape or carry a hammer forged in the heart of a dying star. He’s not going to kill five men with his bare hands and then order a martini. Rather, Jack is a guy whose biggest weapon is his brain ... and who also happens to know how to shoot a gun. At the time of casting, Krasinski had just finished playing a former soldier in the Michael Bay film 13 Hours, for which he underwent the biggest physical transformation of his career thus far. “We wanted to start our story with this guy who was just an office worker who was being pulled into something that he had never done before, and that was a journey that John was making in his career, going from a guy working on a sitcom based in an office to more of an action hero,” Roland says. “It felt like he was the perfect guy.”
When Jack Ryan premieres, fans will meet a young Jack, less than four years into his work at the CIA and earlier in his career than most of Clancy’s books portrayed him. The result is a prequel of sorts, with the very green analyst seemingly stumbling his way into the field when he flags some questionable financial transactions that lead directly to a man who could be the next Osama bin Laden. “Imagine if you were in your desk job and you got called to come outside the building, and then were picked up in a black car and flown to all these crazy places in the world that you didn’t think you were going,” Krasinski says. “That’s basically what Jack experiences in this show.” In other words, even Jack Ryan is hoping he can become the action hero people need him to be. Thankfully, he isn’t on this journey alone. Sitting next to Jack on that last-minute plane ride to Yemen is James Greer, played by Wendell Pierce ( The Wire), one of two supporting characters that made the jump from Clancy’s novels. (The third is Cathy Mueller, Jack’s love interest, played by Australian Abbie Cornish.) But while other adaptations have shown Greer at much higher positions in his career, here he has just returned to desk duty after a scandal gets him removed from the field. Needless to say, Greer’s not too happy about the career move, and from the moment they meet, he isn’t exactly Jack’s biggest fan. “Jim Greer is a complex person, but he lives by a code of selfless service,” Pierce, 54, says. “Even though [ he and Jack] butt heads, they have a common ground in love of country.” As for Krasinski and Pierce, their common
“I know I can’t be Superman. I know I can’t be Iron Man” —John Krasinski
ground seems to be a love of the other’s work. “Really, the reason I did the show is to be best friends with Wendell Pierce,” Krasinski jokes of the veteran actor.
On screen, Greer will help Jack navigate life in the field. With Jack’s brains and Greer’s experience, they’ll work to track Suleiman, the aforementioned terrorist. Played by Palestinian actor Ali Suliman, he is as dangerous as they come. But he also appears to deeply love his family, and in contrast to many Hollywood portrayals of Middle Eastern terrorists, this one’s a bit more complicated. “A lot of terrorist stories are really one-dimensional,” Cuse says. “We wanted to make sure our story was about a bad guy, not a bad culture.” And even that bad guy will have his reasons. In fact, in the entire season, there’s only one character whose story includes flashbacks, and that’s Suleiman.
“This is something I haven’t seen in any other projects when Middle Eastern characters are involved,” Suliman, 40, says. “You see the many sides [of this character].” One of those sides features the introduction of Suleiman’s wife, Hani, played by 28-yearold Dina Shihabi. In the first couple of episodes, Hani is seen playing soccer with her children, loving her husband, but also struggling with the man he has become. “I’m from Saudi Arabia, so I audition for a lot of Arab characters,” Shihabi says. “Ninety-nine per cent of the time, the women are victims and the men are terrorists, and it’s very black-and-white. But you get to see Hani as a human being, as a mother. She’s smart and strong and complex.” For Roland, who served in the US Marine Corps from 2000 to 2006 and was deployed to Iraq for one tour, it was of paramount importance that they show the many different types of individuals who can find themselves entangled in these kinds of situations. “In my experience being in Iraq, the majority of the Arab people that I interacted with were good people who just wanted to provide for their families and live a safe, happy life,” Roland says.
Suleiman’s story, along with Jack’s mission to capture him, will play out over the course of Season 1’s eight episodes, which Amazon will release all at once, allowing audiences to view the series as Cuse and Roland intended—as one long movie. “The pitch to me from the showrunners was, maybe movies weren’t the best place for Jack Ryan to be in the first place,” Krasinski says. “Maybe this long-form television is what we’ve been waiting for to explore Jack.” That storytelling approach also gives the writers a clean slate heading into Season 2, which has already begun filming in South America. “We want every season to be its own close-ended story,” Roland says. “So if you didn’t see the first season, just like you can go into a bookstore at the airport and pick up any Clancy book, you’re going to be able to enjoy the story and feel like there’s nothing that you missed.” But if we’re talking about a hero’s journey, you will have missed something. You’ll have missed the moment Jack Ryan first sets foot in the field, the moment he says goodbye to life behind a desk. Because even in the series’ opening hour, as Jack sits on that plane to Yemen, his path is clear: Jack Ryan is going to be an action hero. Eventually.