Agent Jack Ryan: ranking all the actors who played him

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This article was published 02/09/2018 (2954 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As he takes on the iconic role of reluctant hero Jack Ryan, John Krasinski (The Office, A Quiet Place) isn’t just trying to fill big shoes. He’s trying to fill a lot of shoes.

Four other actors — Harrison Ford, Alec Baldwin, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine — have played the brilliant analyst-turned-field operative who jumped from the pages of Tom Clancy’s best-selling military/intelligence thrillers to box-office success and a five-film franchise.

Krasinski brings the character to TV in Amazon’s eight-episode Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, which is already filming its second season. Set in the present day, the series tells an entirely new story, and isn’t based on any of Clancy’s novels.

None of the Ryan portrayals are bad, but the best benefit from stronger scripts and a nuanced portrayal of Clancy’s character, a military veteran and reluctant hero.

Let’s rank Ryans (from last to first):

5. Chris Pine

In Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014), Pine, 33 at the time, shows Ryan’s nerdy, data-analysis side, sussing out a Russian financial scheme designed to crash the U.S. economy.

However, Pine’s solid, earnest document sleuth takes too quickly to field work, demonstrating a skill set that would qualify Ryan for Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible team but doesn’t work as well for an analyst more comfortable doing research. The portrayal yields a potent Ryan but comes at a price: the loss of the fish-out-of-water charm that is central to Jack’s appeal.

4. Ben Affleck

The Sum of All Fears (2002) veers sharply from Clancy’s 1991 novel, presenting a younger, not-yet-field-tested character rather than the deputy director of the CIA. Affleck, then 29, and Pine have the misfortune of starring in weaker films. But the higher stakes in Sum — potential nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia — and Ryan’s naivete and awkwardness in Affleck’s film, edge out Pine.

3. John Krasinski

The reimagination of the franchise in Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan takes the character back to the early days of his CIA career and his introduction to future wife Cathy (Abbie Cornish).

Krasinski’s Ryan is a desk jockey whose talent for crunching numbers leads him to a potential terrorist threat, sarcastically dubbed “a brand new bin Laden” by his skeptical new boss (Wendell Pierce). But it looks like Jack may be right.

The TV Ryan ranks third based on circumstance and potential. Office memories of practical joker Jim Halpert work for 38-year-old Krasinski, supporting the concept of Ryan as an unlikely action hero, especially in comparison to the more traditional leading men of the movies.

The episodic format gives Jack Ryan the chance to take its time developing the character from novice to professional.

2. Harrison Ford

The Star Wars legend, the only actor credited with multiple Ryan films, earns this spot based on the second of his two outings, 1994’s Clear and Present Danger.

In this version — Ford was 52 when Danger premièred — an older, wiser Ryan is appointed head of CIA intelligence operations, and fights a two-pronged battle. As he seeks congressional funding to take on violent Colombian drug cartels, he learns a secret West Wing cabal and a cartel double agent are scheming to kill the cartel’s leaders and exterminate a U.S. black-ops team to eliminate any evidence.

The internal skulduggery tests Ryan’s analytical skill and field readiness, making the film a bigger challenge for the character and a better showcase for Ford than the less-complex, IRA-focused Patriot Games in 1992.

In both movies, the actor’s signature world-weariness became the source of the middle-aged hero’s reluctance, whereas inexperience and uncertainty motivated the younger Ryans.

1. Alec Baldwin

As is often the case, the first portrayal was the best. In 1990’s The Hunt for Red October, set in the Cold War ’80s, Ryan is a book-smart, field-averse CIA analyst who rejects conventional wisdom by theorizing that a rogue Soviet submarine captain (Sean Connery) isn’t bent on attacking the U.S., but instead seeks to defect and hand over his state-of-the-art technology.

A youthful Baldwin, then 31, deftly conveyed Ryan’s creative intellect and wet-behind-the-ears callowness. It was a combustible mix that drew the CIA analyst into problems only he could detect, while raising questions for viewers (and himself) about whether he was capable of solving them. Anyone familiar with Jack Ryan knows the answer.

— USA Today