John Krasinski reboots ‘Jack Ryan’ hero with a ‘classic hero’ spirit

EASTON, Md. – As paper-pushing Jim from “The Office,” John Krasinski never entered the workplace quite like this.

On the windy, rainy tarmac of a small airport — the setting for a key scene of the new Amazon streaming series “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” (premiering Aug. 31) – a Coast Guard Jayhawk helicopter arrives in glorious fashion, angled a little for proper landing and spectacularly whipping up water from puddles.

Out of the copter walks Krasinski, clad in a suit that gets wet quickly, playing a young CIA analyst who’s suddenly thrown in the deep end of international intrigue. Jack Ryan looks a little serious about the whole thing. Krasinski, on the other hand, can’t stop smiling afterward.

“It’s the best roller-coaster ride you can get,” the star reports, saying the experience is “10 times cooler” than it looks. (And honestly, it looks really cool.) “It was just like little kid-level excitement.”

In certain circles, Ryan is as iconic a hero as Jason Bourne and James Bond, other do-gooders who jumped from page to screen. There have been 21 books featuring Tom Clancy’s popular character since 1984 — other writers took up the authorial mantle after Clancy’s death in 2013. Krasinski is the fifth actor to play Ryan, with his predecessors all saving the day in movies: Alec Baldwin (1990’s “The Hunt for Red October”), Harrison Ford (1992’s “Patriot Games” and 1994’s “Clear and Present Danger”), Ben Affleck (2002’s “The Sum of All Fears”) and Chris Pine (2014’s “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit”).

But “Jack Ryan” executive producer Carlton Cuse (“Lost”) figures now is a great time to reboot a “classic hero,” a distinguishing characteristic of Clancy’s literary Ryan.

“He’s a guy who’s trying to keep his compass of moralism always pointed true north,” Cuse says. “Obviously the world of intelligence is shady, murky and requires compromises, and we’re on this journey with an analyst used to writing reports who’s now actually confronted with a bunch of situations where he has to make split-second moral decisions.”

A former Marine who also had a stint on Wall Street, Krasinski’s Ryan is nearly four years into a tour working a desk job as a counterterrorism analyst, specifically looking into financial matters. He has discovered some anomalies in Yemen where a lot of money is moving around, which has him worrying that another 9/11 is in the works. What Ryan discovers leads to him getting picked up by that aforementioned helicopter at a swanky house party in Annapolis, Maryland, then dropped off with his group chief James Greer (Wendell Pierce) waiting to whisk him off on a private plane to the Middle East.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. What? I can’t go to Yemen,” a surprised Ryan says. “I’m an analyst. I don’t interrogate people, I write reports.” Greer looks bemused before he counters: “Get on the [expletive] plane.”

It’s a “monumentally important” moment and transformation of sorts, Krasinski says. “He goes from just being an analyst behind a desk and the safety of numbers — what I would like to refer to as the ‘nerd version’ of Jack Ryan — and then the curtain is pulled back a little bit of what the rest of the CIA can do.”

Cuse sees “Jack Ryan” as a prequel to the books and movies. Ryan meets Cathy Muller (Abbie Cornish), the doctor specializing in infectious diseases who will later be his wife, at the shindig in the pilot episode, and Greer (played by James Earl Jones in three of the movies) was a CIA station chief in Karachi — and a mythical operator in the agency — before getting stuck with a “backwater” job at headquarters after he has “run afoul of management,” Pierce says. Ryan is his key to getting back out there in the twilight of his career, and “while we’re a little antagonistic, you kind of see the rapport that they begin to build.”

Putting Ryan in the thick of it from the start is “a cool way to bring our audience into our world with someone who is almost as inexperienced as they were, so they can kind of go on the journey with him,” says executive producer Graham Roland, a former Marine who did a tour in Fallujah, Iraq.

“Weirdly, Jack Ryan isn’t an action-movie character,” Krasinski says. “He gets to do action-movie things, but he’s really just a guy who’s trying to serve his country and do what’s right.”

The actor is, similarly, not exactly an action-movie star. But after nine seasons of NBC’s “The Office,” Krasinski shocked some folks by getting into ripped shape and playing a military man in 2016’s “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi,” the role that won him “Jack Ryan.”

“I wasn’t given the opportunities as much to do stuff like that, which I totally get. It’s hard to just imagine like, ‘Oh yeah, now Jim’s an action hero with a gun,’ ” says Krasinski, who once auditioned for Captain America (“That damn Chris Evans. He deserves nothing,” he jokes).

Pierce says Krasinski makes a great Ryan because he’s able to “really tap into that everyman quality.” Roland offers the fact that he has a Tom Hanks-ish “intangible relatability.” And Cuse believes his star’s old “Office” gig lends something to the new show.

“He starts in a cubicle in the CIA, but then he goes on and does something really quite different and, in our opinion, quite special.”

Just as important for the series creators as having a good hero is portraying the CIA in an authentic way at a time when our Department of Justice and intelligence system seem to always be under attack, sometimes via presidential tweets.

“Our overwhelming experience was these are apolitical, professional, competent people who are working really hard to protect us,” Cuse says.

For Pierce, what the intelligence community does should never be taken for granted.

“The incessant continuum of being ever-vigilant to protect interests and people of the United States, it never stops,” he says. “And while the movie comes to an end or a storyline comes to an end, you see in this, it has to be ongoing because you can never let your guard down. The barbarians are at the gates.”

Even though the Amazon premiere is days away, Cuse and Roland are already a couple of months deep into Season 2, now filming in Bogota, Colombia. They view each season as a different book, and while the first season centers on foiling a Middle East terrorist plot, the second is a political thriller set in South America featuring Noomi Rapace as a German intelligence agent and a story focused on the Ryan/Greer relationship.

Helicopters are a highlight, but the coolest thing for Kransinski about his franchise character? No capes or superhuman powers.

“You could technically be Jack Ryan,” he says. “There is something I hope that catches on when people watch this that gives them a glimmer of hope that there are people like Jack Ryan in real life on the front lines fighting for them.”

Brian Truitt, USA TODAY