Prime Video was eager to reach for more Reacher, launching production on Season 3 months before releasing Season 2 — and months before announcing that a third season was in the works.
The action-packed crime drama, based on Lee Child’s Jack Reacher novel series, stars Alan Ritchson as the title character, an itinerant ex-military police investigator with a knack for finding himself in mortal danger. In Season 3, Reacher “must go undercover to rescue an informant held by a haunting foe from his past,” according to Prime Video.
Here’s everything else we know.
Will there be a Reacher Season 3?
Reacher earned an early renewal for Season 3, with Prime Video announcing the news in December 2023, nearly two weeks before the release of Season 2. In a video screened at the CCXP convention in São Paulo, Brazil, Ritchson surprised fans with the news that Reacher’s cast and crew were already at work on Season 3.
The renewal makes sense, given Reacher’s success on Prime Video, where the first season became one of the top five most-watched original seasons ever on Prime Video in the U.S. and globally, according to Amazon. Then Season 2 became the streaming service’s No. 1 title worldwide across both series and movies in 2023 during its premiere weekend, with its global audience growing 50 percent between seasons in the first three days after the second season’s debut.
When and where is Season 3 filming?
Ritchson posted Instagram photos of himself pretending to drive a motionless truck against a blue screen in a Toronto soundstage in January, telling fans that filming on Season 3 had actually began months prior. “You’re playing Reacher. You started filming the season in the summer, but a strike pushed you into the bitter cold of an uninhabitable Toronto winter,” he wrote. “As a result, the driving scenes aren’t so drivey anymore.”
On which of Lee Child’s novels is Season 3 based?
In January, Prime Video confirmed that Reacher Season 3 would be based on Lee Child’s 2003 novel Persuader, the seventh book in the British author’s Jack Reacher series.
In that story, Reacher comes to the aid of DEA boss Susan Duffy, who has realized she put one of her agents in a “death trap” in the guise of a heavily-guarded Maine mansion, according to publisher Bantam. “Staging a brilliant ruse, Reacher hurtles into the dark heart of a vast criminal enterprise,” the book description adds. “Trying to rescue an agent whose time is running out, Reacher enters a crime lord’s waterfront fortress. There he will find a world of secrecy and violence — and confront some unfinished business from his own past.”
Ritchson raved about the story in an Instagram video this January. “Persuader is one of the best books there is,” he said. “Can’t wait for you to see this season. And the good thing is, that means we get to eat a lot of lobster.”
Is Maria Sten returning for Reacher Season 3?
Prime Video has also let on that Maria Sten will once again play Frances Neagley, a former military colleague of Reacher’s, in the show’s third season. Neagley doesn’t appear in Persuader, so her appearance in Season 3 will mark a departure from the book, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Who has joined the Reacher Season 3 cast?
Amy Sussman/Getty Images, Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images
Prime Video, Skydance Television, and Paramount Television Studios announced in February that Anthony Michael Hall (The Dead Zone) and Sonya Cassidy (Lodge 49) had been cast as series regulars in Reacher Season 3.
Hall will play the formidable businessman Zachary Beck, who owns a rug import company that Reacher and his cohorts suspect of hiding a more nefarious operation. Cassidy, meanwhile, will play the aforementioned Susan Duffy, described as an intelligent, tough, and sarcastic DEA agent.
Tee: Sela Shiloni, Berchtold: Rowan Daly, Montesinos & Stewart: Courtesy of Prime Video
In March, the streamer and the production companies behind Reacher revealed four more additions to the cast: Brian Tee (Chicago Med), Johnny Berchtold (The Passenger), Roberto Montesinos (9-1-1: Lone Star), and Daniel David Stewart (For All Mankind). Stewart will recur in Season 3, while the other three actors are new series regulars, according to Deadline.
Tee will play Quinn, a physically intimidating Army lieutenant colonel whom Reacher investigated a decade ago when Quinn sold military secrets to hostile nations. Berchtold will play Richard Beck, Zachary’s son, a sensitive and artistic college student who was left mutilated by a traumatic kidnapping. Montesinos will play soon-to-retire DEA agent Guillermo Villanueva, a mentor and father figure to Duffy. And Stewart will play Steven Elliot, a clean-cut rookie DEA agent who’s acclimating to the job.
Who’s directing in Season 3?
Ritchson told Instagram followers in January that Sam Hill, who had helmed a few Season 1 and Season 2 episodes, would be directing every Season 3 installment. “He is something of a savior [in] Season 3 as he has taken on the heavy yolk of directing every episode so that we can cross-shoot the entire season due to the fallout of the strike,” Ritchson wrote. “It would take us months, maybe years, to untangle the mess the strike caused otherwise. I’ve wanted to say this for years. Sam isn’t 6’5” and 240 [pounds]… but he’s the real Reacher.”
Reacher, Season 3, TBA, Prime Video