Chris Marquette on Joining Reacher Season 4 and Being Thrown Straight Into the Action

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Chris Marquette had almost no time to think about what it would mean to join the established world of Reacher. as when the opportunity arrived, he barely had time to think about the role at all.

Marquette recalled receiving a series of urgent calls on a Friday night after another actor unexpectedly dropped out of the role of Jacob. He auditioned, met with showrunner Nick Santora, learned on Saturday that he had the part and was on a plane Sunday to begin filming Monday.

“I hadn’t even had time to read the scripts,” Marquette recalled. “I had literally just prepared whatever I needed to be filming that Monday.”

That whirlwind introduction ultimately became an unexpected advantage. Just as Marquette was suddenly entering an enormous action production without knowing exactly what awaited him, Jacob finds himself pulled into Reacher’s world wholly unprepared for what comes next.

Marquette quickly realized that his own experience could inform Jacob’s journey. After a devastating event throws the small-town police officer into Reacher’s orbit, Jacob suddenly finds himself doing things far outside the boundaries of his ordinary life.

“Next thing I know, I’m getting shot at and I’m driving getaway cars and a beautiful woman is crushing on me. I’m doing, like, hero stuff,” Marquette said. “He’s the hero, he’s a gladiator. I look like I work in tech.”

The parallel with his own experience was impossible to miss: one moment Marquette was going about his normal life, and the next he was on a plane preparing to spend six months shooting one of television’s biggest action series. He leaned into that sense of uncertainty, allowing Jacob to genuinely seem as though he has no idea what is about to happen from one minute to the next.

It also presented Marquette with a particularly meaningful opportunity after a career spent frequently playing what he jokingly described as “the guest star guy” the character who suffers something terrible before the show’s heroes take over.

Jacob initially appears to fit that familiar mold. He experiences a horrific tragedy and meets the person who seems destined to solve it. Except this time, Marquette’s character doesn’t disappear.

“In this case I didn’t go home,” he said. “In this case I stay and then become this unassumingly heroic guy.”

For Marquette, it meant being simultaneously prepared by decades of acting experience and completely unprepared for an opportunity he had been waiting for throughout his adult career. One of Marquette’s priorities was ensuring Jacob never immediately accepted the extraordinary figure who had suddenly entered his life. Rather than treating Reacher’s seemingly superhuman abilities as perfectly ordinary, Marquette wanted Jacob to react the way an actual person might: Who is this guy, and why can he do all of this?

“I wanted to play against that a little bit,” Marquette explained. “What if this character isn’t just like, ‘Oh yeah, no, we’re all heroes. We’re just going to figure this out,’ right? What if someone’s just like, ‘Who are you and what are you doing, guy?’”

That perspective allowed Jacob to become something of an audience surrogate within the heightened Reacher universe. Marquette recalled one moment in which Reacher rapidly memorizes the numbers of burner phones before casually handing them out. Rather than simply moving forward with the scene, Marquette repeatedly reacted in disbelief, looking around as though wondering why nobody else recognized how extraordinary the feat was. The reaction wasn’t scripted, but it survived into the finished episode.

“They kept these really nice subtle things that I got to throw in,” he said.

Jacob’s initial discomfort extends into the physicality of the character. He may be a police officer, but he is a small-town cop whose usual problems are a far cry from the violence and danger that surround Reacher. That distinction gave Marquette the chance to construct a physical evolution across the season, one that mirrored his own growing confidence on the production.

He eagerly volunteered to perform stunts whenever possible, inspired in part by Alan Ritchson’s willingness to do his own. An early stunt required Marquette to throw himself across a hallway and convincingly land unconscious, something he successfully persuaded the stunt team to let him attempt himself. As production continued, however, Jacob gradually became more comfortable occupying the physical world around him. Marquette remembered initially struggling with one of the show’s signature pieces of visual choreography, in which an actor’s movement is precisely coordinated with the camera to create the imposing physicality associated with Reacher.

“His journey was that for this character and for me as an actor and as a person,” he said, describing the process as learning to allow that physicality “to blossom into this cool, heroic stoicness.”

There were moments when Marquette could hardly believe the scale of what he was being asked to do.

“What they’re asking me to do is usually reserved for, like, a pretty exclusive group of actors,” he recalled thinking. “This is some Tom Cruise stuff.”

Whether driving stunt cars across constructed bridges, being shot at or performing amid raining glass, Marquette embraced every opportunity. “I loved every second of it,” he said. “It was one of the most exhilarating and wonderful experiences I’ve ever had.”

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