Justin Cook chats to Jack Ryan executive producers Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland…
Amazon brought Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan to New York Comic-Con this year, debuting the show’s first official trailer and first seven minutes of the pilot and bringing out stars/executive producers John Krasinski, Abbie Cornish, Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland in front of the hundreds of fans who waited for hours to get into the panel. Before the panel, however, Flickering Myth was lucky enough to sit down with Cornish, Cuse and Roland, who shared some interesting tidbits about the forthcoming series.
When we asked what still makes Jack Ryan an important and relevant character over three decades since the character was created in Tom Clancy’s book The Hunt for Red October, co-creator Roland replied, “I think there’s a relatability to Jack Ryan that you don’t find as you much with say a Jack Bauer, or a James Bond, or even a Jason Bourne, or these professional spies who feel very well-equipped for every situation that they come up against. There’s about Jack that’s a little more of an everyman, who gets himself in over his head but yet finds his way out of it, kind of through his intellect rather than through his physical prowess. So I think that’s a big appeal of the character.”
Revisiting the question later on, co-creator Cuse likened the show to Clint Eastwood and Bradley Cooper’s cinematic foray into the military world and added, “I think more like American Sniper, a movie like that. We all hope that there are guys like Jack Ryan that sit out there between us and the chaos of the world. It’s a very positive portrayal of the military and espionage world. I think that there are a lot of other spy stories that are really about evil and pernicious [and are] full of double-crossing, double agents and triple agents and that’s not really our intent. Our intent, like the Clancy books, is to show that there are guys out there that we might never see or hear about that, who actually do things to keep us safe.”
Krasinski will be the fifth actor to portray Jack Ryan, following Alec Baldwin (The Hunt for Red October), Harrison Ford (Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger), Ben Affleck (The Sum of All Fears) and Chris Pine (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit). While he’ll certainly be giving a new interpretation of the character, Cuse did say that out of all the previous Jack Ryans, Harrison Ford’s has the biggest influence on the influence on the show.
When CIA analyst Jack Ryan stumbles upon a suspicious series of bank transfers his search for answers pulls him from the safety of his desk job and catapults him into a deadly game of cat and mouse throughout Europe and the Middle East, with a rising terrorist figurehead preparing for a massive attack against the US and her allies.
Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, will tell a self-contained, original story, not directly adapted from any previous Tom Clancy books; the eight-episode series will hit Amazon Prime Video in summer 2018. Wendell Pierce, Peter Fonda, Timothy Hutton and Mena Massoud also star.
Justin Cook
