As audiences say goodbye to Prime Video’s smash hit show Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, the key cast admits they did wonder if their characters would make it or get killed in a shock twist right out of the gate.
“If it was going to be anyone, I didn’t think it would be me because it always takes at least one or two episodes for me to come into the show anyway,” joked Micheal Kelly, who plays CIA operative Mike November. “I think it is instinctual of every actor on every show they’re ever on, especially one in which characters die, to skip to the end of the episode and be like, ‘Ah, cool. I’m still alive.’ Certainly, I thought there was a chance, but I’m glad it didn’t happen.”
“On the other hand,” teased John Krasinski, Jack Ryan‘s titular lead and executive producer, “I was actively trying to make it Michael’s character for three seasons. That plan didn’t go well for me.”
Wendell Pierce, who plays Ryan’s mentor James Greer, added, “I thought about it briefly, and if they had came to me and said, ‘We’re going to kill you off,’ I would have asked for this really long, drawn-out, torturous, dramatic death. I was going to chew that scenery even more than I already did. I was going to go for it, but luckily it didn’t happen.”
The fourth and final season sees Ryan as the acting deputy director of the CIA, tackling corruption in the corridors of power and what appears to be an alliance between a drug cartel and terrorists.
What surprised Pierce was how he felt about leaving his character and the show behind.
“It wasn’t hard because I had a profound sense of accomplishment,” the actor explained. “I thought we had tapped into something unique.”
“Before this, whenever I thought of the CIA, it didn’t look like the country. When I first went there and was attached to a consultant, who is still a friend today, I realized that it was so much more of a special experience.”
He continued, “I brought a lot of what he went through, what happens to officers and the complexities of dealing with their professional and personal lives to the table, and we put all that in the story. John was very good at making sure things that we have researched and experienced got put into the script.”
“We have a line this season about how the CIA looks like the country it serves. We did that with the show and gave the spy thriller a new look, something specific and truthful. With that, I leave the show with a great sense of pride and accomplishment as much as anything else.”
Fans get to enjoy Jack Ryan’s final six-episode run two episodes at a time, with new installments dropping on Prime Video each week from Friday, June 30, 2023, to the epic finale on Friday, July 14, 2023. However, were Krasinski and his fellow producers tempted to end the run with a trilogy of feature-length movies instead?
“This is the first time that we are releasing the show two episodes at a time, and there is a reason for that,” the actor and EP explained. “I think that they do feel like three separate little movies. Wherever you are in the show at that time, they go together, but that wasn’t necessarily what we intended when we started out.”
“The most important thing for me this season, other than obviously making it an exciting and action-packed season for fans, was to culminate these relationships, friendships, and characters in a satisfying way that connected with the audience. In a very real way, we wanted it to feel like we’re saying goodbye to friends.”
That in itself was harder than Krasinski had anticipated.
“I cry at everything to the disappointment of my kids. It’s embarrassing as hell, but I cry at everything,” he confessed. “I think I realized I have the ability to shut out reality until it smacks me in the face, so I had blocked out the show ending until we did my last shot. When they called wrap, it wasn’t just that the show was over. This group of people walking toward me who we had worked with for two years because we shot seasons three and four back to back through the pandemic, and we bonded.”
“Seeing the crew, writers, producers, and this amazing cast all coming out was overwhelming and extremely emotional. Honestly, I probably should have dealt with it earlier so that it didn’t hit me like a tidal wave at the end.”
Did the trio make it work so that their final scenes fell at the end of the shoot?
“Unfortunately, on a show of this massive scale, we couldn’t feasibly plan where we could be like, ‘Okay, let’s do the last scene, and we’ll all be together,'” Kelly mused. “I think we all had our individual moments of being like, ‘Okay, well, this is the last one with all three of us,’ or, ‘Wow. That was the last one with us two.'”
“Funnily enough, on my last day, I got Covid, so I didn’t even get to shoot,” he laughed. “It was literally the last day of filming. I couldn’t believe it. I walked to set, and they called me and said, ‘You got it!’ That was interesting and not the ending I saw coming at all.”
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