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Read the full article in our press archive or go to the British GQ website.

After almost 20 years on screen, with landmark roles in Reacher and a Guy Ritchie movie, the actor isn’t playing the nice guy. He is the nice guy
Seated across from me at a restaurant in Midtown, New York, Alan Ritchson is nearly twice my size. The lower half of the actor’s 6ft 3in, 108kg frame is hidden from view, but his upper half is basically the same diameter as the table. So our waiter could be forgiven for thinking that a heaping pile of cured meats is his order alone, and not for us to share. Still, Ritchson feels singled out when it lands in front of him. “Oh yeah, put all the pepperoni in front of me,” he smirks. “For the big guy!” the waiter laughs nervously before running out of the room.

This is Ritchson’s calling card: he’s the big guy. He’s best known as the star of Amazon’s Reacher, the show based on the popular book series by writer Lee Child. In the novels, it is well-established that protagonist Jack Reacher, an ex-military police officer, is 6ft 5in and 114kg, with fists “the size of a supermarket chicken.” Over the course of the first book alone, Reacher breaks two necks and four fingers, drowns a man, kicks one throat and slits another, headbutts, pops an eyeball with his finger, and stabs someone in the face, all in the name of justice. So, the person playing him had to look like a guy who could pull off all of the above. Tom Cruise, who at 5ft 7in was cast as Reacher in the 2012 film adaptation, much to fans’ dismay, didn’t exactly fit the bill.

“Casting Reacher was obviously make or break,” says Child. “What made Alan perfect was his first two seconds of screen-test time – before he even did anything. He just owned the screen and commanded the scene, which was what we needed: an implacable and invulnerable presence, thinking ahead, seeing things the audience didn’t. Then it got even better; his dialogue was great, and his huge physicality hit the spot.”

Once he landed the role, Ritchson was asked to gain an additional 14kg in eight months to get to the size producers wanted – a feat he says he achieved naturally by increasing his calorie intake and working out for two hours a day “like [his] life depended on it” in a home gym he built himself. His body, which he likes to cover entirely in Dove Men+Care deodorant, suffered under the strain. “By the time I showed up to set, I was beyond fatigued,” he says. He would experience cramps that could last as long as five minutes at a time, just from picking up his phone, and his testosterone levels were “wrecked.”

Now, at the age of 41, Ritchson is trying testosterone replacement therapy at the suggestion of his doctors, and taking Trace Minerals (liquid micronutrients) to help with the cramps. He’s also had to replace his entire wardrobe twice, after going from a size large to an extra-large to an extra- extra-large. But his hard work has paid off. Following the premiere weekend of Reacher’s second season in December, it became Prime Video’s most-watched title of the year.

Ritchson wasn’t always the big guy. Growing up in Niceville, a small city in the Florida panhandle, near the Eglin Air Force Base where his father worked, he was “wiry and very athletic.” Baseball was his sport; his teammates called him the “vacuum cleaner” because nothing could get by him. (“I have good hands,” he explains.)

Ritchson thought he might play baseball professionally, but after enrolling in an acting class in high school because of a girl, he also got into singing and a form of competitive acting called forensics, which he even won a state championship ring for. “I remember football players shoving me into lockers and being like, ‘You know it ain’t a real sport, motherfucker,’” he says.

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Read a snippet of the article below. Head to our press archive or The Hollywood Reporter website to read the full article, which is featured in the April 10th issue of the magazine.

‘Reacher’ shot him into Hollywood’s top tier, but behind that success — the 41-year-old reveals in an unusually candid interview — was a harrowing struggle with bipolar disorder, sexual assault and a suicide attempt that he survived with a mix of faith, love and brute force.

Tattoos are a relatively new obsession for Alan Ritchson. His collection is growing and each piece is thoughtfully selected. There’s a lotus on his wrist to honor his wife of 17 years, Cat. “She’s the flower, I’m undoubtedly the mud,” he says. There are separate tattoos inspired by the couple’s three young boys — a peaceful dove for Calem, an abstract flame for Edan, and a crest with a shield and swords for Amory. There’s a massive skull with a crown on his bicep and another down the way inspired by a Richard Gere remake of the Japanese movie Hachiko about a faithful dog that is meant to symbolize loyalty and devotion.

But the newest one, finished during a 16-hour session in February in Toronto on a day off from filming Reacher, the Prime Video juggernaut that has made him one of Hollywood’s most in-demand leading men, is just for him. It serves as a permanent reminder of what happened during his darkest days and who he is now as a result of surviving a near-fatal incident. The tattoo features the two overlapping masks the ancient Greeks used to represent comedy and tragedy, joy mixed with pain. “Tattoos, I realized, are very much an opportunity for me to tell my story and the things that matter most to me: family, the story of my wife and our connection, what loyalty means to me, faith. But this right here,” he says, rubbing the skin on his forearm, “is as close as I’ll get to a personal identity. It has a dual meaning for me in the extremes — the happy, the sad, the ups and the downs — as somebody who lives with bipolar and ADHD on a daily basis. Being bipolar has wreaked havoc on my life many, many times. I would wish it away if I could, but it’s so much a part of who I am now that I should celebrate it a little or, at least, accept it.”

Ritchson started getting the majority of the ink only in the past couple of years, after the breakout success of Reacher and after the breakdown he refers to as his existential crisis. “Mental health is an everyday conversation for me,” he says. “I was just texting my psychiatrist on the way over here for my daily check-in, and she asked, ‘How are you?’ I was, like, ‘I’m great!’ That, to her, is not always a good sign. ‘Are you really? Too great?’”

Life has never been better for Alan Ritchson. He arrives at West Hollywood’s Blackwood Coffee Bar on an early morning in March at a time when there are billboards across Los Angeles featuring his work. Some are supersized to promote the second season of Reacher, the series that made him famous playing a muscular savant who kicks ass in spectacular fashion. Others promote a turn as a sensitive family man hell-bent on saving his daughter from a fatal disease in the faith-based tear-jerker Ordinary Angels, opposite two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank. By the time this is published, his face will be high up with two Henrys (Cavill and Golding) advertising a guns-blazing actioner from Guy Ritchie called The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, a film that finds him annihilating Nazis (with fists and feet but mostly bow and arrow).

Life looks good on him, too. Ritchson, 41, stands 6-foot-3 and is 240 pounds of muscle with model good looks. He settles into a seat on Blackwood’s back patio, removes a pair of black Celine sunglasses and rolls up the sleeves of a chambray shirt to reveal the mask tattoos, accessorized with a special-edition Rolex inspired by James Cameron’s record-setting deep sea dive (“a reminder that I can make a contribution to mankind that’s bigger than my career,” Ritchson says), a tennis bracelet with a string of diamonds measuring 1 carat each, and a killer white smile that could stop traffic. Once Ritchson starts answering questions during a conversation that will stretch past two hours, he transforms from larger-than-life action star into who he really is: an unfiltered, faith-driven family man who is unafraid to show his scars as a way to fulfill God’s wishes and live in service to others. He’s also very funny.

Alan sat down with The Hollywood Reporter during his cover shoot to talk about his career bucket list.