Spoilers for Reacher’s Season 3 finale are ahead! If you haven’t seen it yet, you can stream it with an Amazon Prime subscription.
Ever since it was announced that Reacher Season 3 would follow Lee Childs’ book Persuader and we learned that Olivier Richters would play Paulie, we’ve been waiting for the Reacher vs. Paulie fight. Well, folks, we were finally able to watch it when the finale dropped on the 2025 TV schedule, and it did not disappoint. What makes it even better is understanding just how much work went into pulling it off, and thankfully, Richters told me all about it.
When I asked Olivier Richters – who is 7’2” and almost a full foot taller than Alan Ritchson, who is 6’3” – about filming the Paulie vs. Reacher fight, he immediately noted how hard he trained. His co-star has been doing this for a long time, and he’s an accomplished action actor. So, the Dutch bodybuilder knew he needed to “keep up,” explaining:
It started for me with four months of stunt training to be the best fighter ever, because Alan is not only a great actor, but he's a great fighter as well. So I had to keep up.
He sure did keep up, and he proved to be a worthy adversary for Reacher.
The fight involves Reacher getting slammed into a truck, Paulie taking a bunch of punches, Reacher getting hung by a chain and releasing himself from it, oh, and an absolutely wild fight in the water as well as Paulie’s bloody death. Not to mention, the fight spans across multiple locations and takes up about 14 minutes of the episode.
So, after seeing all that, it was put into perspective when Richters told me how much time and effort went into shooting this ginormous action sequence:
And it was many weeks of night shoots and day shoots of sometimes 10 to 14 hours on set. Alan and me at [the] last night we ended at 5:30 a.m. on the bridge, and we were both devastated, and we hugged each other. We did it, and we thanked each other.
I also want to thank them for putting their bodies through this. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been. However, it looked incredible on-screen. I think it’s safe to say that after anticipating this moment for a very long time, it was well worth the wait and work.
To really hammer that point home, Richters told me that during the press day, he spoke to Ritchson about the scene, and they both agreed it was the “most physically demanding thing” they’d ever done:
I just spoke to him one hour ago. He said, ‘It was the most physically demanding thing that I've ever done.’ And I said, ‘Me too, me too.’ Yeah, I really had to recover from it.
Well, that means a lot coming from Alan Ritchson. The actor has made three seasons of Reacher and has filmed epic sequences that have required him to fight, be thrown into walls and more. Plus, the Jack Reacher actor stays in tip-top shape. He’s no stranger to the demanding action required for his Prime Video show. However, this Paulie fight sounds like it was a different (and bigger) beast.
Now, I have to go back and re-watch this highly anticipated moment in the book-to-screen adaptation of Persuader to really appreciate all the work that went into it. For both Richters and Ritchson to say it was “the most physically demanding thing” they’ve ever done is pretty wild, and it just goes to show how remarkable this long-awaited and epic fight was.
