John Krasinski on Filming Jack Ryan for Amazon

John Krasinski talks about filming Jack Ryan for Amazon

It was announced back in 2015 that Amazon was doing a Jack Ryan series, based on the character created by Tom Clancy. In 2016, John Krasinski (The Office, 13 Hours) had taken the title role. While doing press for the upcoming Disneynature film Born in China (see photos below), which he narrates, we got a chance to chat with Krasinski about filming Jack Ryan. Krasinski told us about how this feels like a film, how we’re going to see the character before he becomes a hero, and doing his own stunts.

“It’s been awesome,” Krasinski said of shooting. “We’re shooting something that I think is really special. I certainly love what we’re doing. It’s one of those things where I’ve been a huge fan, too, so it’s great to hear that you’re a huge fan. I hope the huge fans are the most happy with what we’re doing. But I think at the end of the day, the idea of going back to the days where Jack Ryan was an analyst, where he’s sitting at a desk, crunching numbers. And then you get taken on the full ride. I think the movies always start with him as kind of this established hero figure. And in our show, he really starts as a guy who’s just crunching numbers. And one of the things he was researching was something real, and he’s the only one who can go. So it feels like, you know, you get taken on a ride from the beginning, so it feels really, really nice.”

He continued, “And the other thing is, we’re shooting it in this epic way, where all eight episodes are cross-boarded, so we’ll shoot one day, the end of episode three, and the second half of the day, you’re shooting episode 1, the opening shot of the show. It’s pretty wild. I’ve never had anything like that. It’s really exciting and it’s a lot of hard work, but we’re really pumped about where we’re headed.”

Krasinski talked about shooting in this style. “It feels way more like a movie than it does a TV show,” he said. “I think because the days are really long. There’s a lot of hard work that we’re doing, because there’s so much ground to cover. We’ll do a talky scene where we’re giving out all this information and then we’ll go right into a scene…a crazy hand-to-hand fight scene. It feel more more like a movie, than, certainly, The Office. I’ll put it that way. It just feels like we’re shooting one giant movie.”

We asked Krasinski about doing stunt work on Jack Ryan. “It’s been awesome,” he said. “I’m happy to say I’ve been doing all my stunts, and most of the fight stuff, I do first. We definitely have an incredible stunt team that will come in and do certain things, but they’ve been really cool to teach me to do a lot of my own stuff, so it’s been great.”

Are you guys excited for Jack Ryan and John Krasinski playing the lead? Are you going to see Born in China? If you see the film the first weekend, a portion of all proceeds go to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), with the funds earmarked for helping snow leopards and pandas. Let us know your thoughts in the comments or tweet us @ComingSoonnet.