Jack Ryan is a character we’ve seen in cinema many times before, with the CIA analyst having been played on the big screen by a succession of big name actors: Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine.

The most recent adaptation of Tom Clancy’s popular novels, however, has been a small screen project. John Krasinski portrayed the character across four seasons on a self-titled Prime Video series between 2018 and 2023, which broadly attracted positive reviews throughout its run.

Now, that series has been given a feature-length spin-off – albeit one which is premiering on streaming rather than in cinemas – with Krasinski back in the lead role and also on co-screenwriting duties.

In many ways Jack Ryan: Ghost War is a straight-forward continuation of the series, with Wendell Pierce and Michael Kelly among the other returning faces. But speaking exclusively to Radio Times ahead of the release, Krasinski pinpointed one key way in which the film differed from the TV show.

“I think it does amp up the tension and the action,” he explained. “In my opinion, this is a much bigger playground than we ever had on the show. This is more action that I think we had in many seasons of the show.”

In order to make that step-up, it was vital to hire some new recruits. And luckily, the movie was able to rely on someone who has a fair bit of experience when it came to high-octane action flicks.

“You need the best of the best,” Krasinski said. “But our stunt coordinator, Lee Morrison, was undoubtedly the best we’ve ever had.

“We stole him from an indie franchise called James Bond,” he joked. “And now I think he’s ours forever!’

Morrison worked on all five 007 flicks in the Daniel Craig era, in a more junior capacity for the first two before moving up to assistant stunt coordinator for Skyfall and Spectre and then eventually stunt coordinator for No Time To Die. He’s also recently worked on Frankenstein and Dune Part 2 – so certainly not a bad CV!

Meanwhile, the film’s director Andrew Bernstein – who had previously helmed three episodes of the TV show’s second season – also enjoyed the opportunity to up the ante when it came to the scale.

“While we honoured the TV series, and we can’t run from it, we wanted to make this its own thing,” he said. “So the big challenge was how are we going to differentiate it, so that people who had not seen the series would enjoy the movie?

“And that was manifested in character exploration [but also] how I shot the movie. We wanted to shoot it much different than how we shot the TV series – we [pay] homage to older movies, ’70s spy movies, even movies like Patriot Games, the early Jack Ryan movies.

“Those were our inspirations in making it, so it was fun to sort of reinvent the language a little bit on how we were going to do this.”

He added that shooting sequences such as “a massive car chase in central London” and “a big boat chase in Dubai” presented incredible challenges, but added that it was “a great puzzle to put together.”

The most high profile addition to the cast for the film is Sienna Miller, who plays a new character named Emma Marlow, and the English actress explained that she found the action side of things more demanding than she had anticipated.

“I underestimated just how hard work it really is,” she said. “A lot of those shootout scenes… I found myself doing like maybe 95 squats an hour!

“I was like, ‘I’m going to duck behind a sofa, and I’m going to pop out and shoot someone, which is essentially doing squats for the entire night, which was was rough and took some adjusting too.”

She added: “But I got fit, which is not going to happen unless I’m forced to… so everybody won!”

Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War is now streaming on Prime Video. All four seasons of Jack Ryan are also available to stream now – you can sign up now for a free 30-day Prime Video trial.

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