Abbie Cornish on Jack Ryan: Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland

Abbie Cornish, Jack Ryan and the team behind the Amazon relaunch

Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan reached Amazon Prime Video on August 31, 2018, with John Krasinski, known for The Office and A Quiet Place, in the title role. The first season runs eight hour-long episodes and follows a low-level CIA analyst who spots a pattern in terrorist financing, links suspicious bank transfers to a rising extremist named Suleiman and finds himself pulled from his desk into the field for the first time.

The series was created by Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland. It ran four seasons, eight episodes each in the first three and six in the last, and ended with the season 4 finale on July 14, 2023. Wendell Pierce plays Jack's boss, James Greer, and Ali Suliman and Dina Shihabi appear among the main cast. Abbie Cornish plays Cathy Mueller, Jack's love interest, in season 1 and returned for the final season.

Cornish, an Australian actress who was born on August 7, 1982, in Lochinvar, New South Wales, built her reputation on films such as Somersault, Bright Star, Limitless and RoboCop. Her Jack Ryan role puts her opposite Krasinski, and she is credited for 14 episodes across seasons 1 and 4.

Cornish also has an award record outside the franchise. She won the Australian Film Institute award for Best Actress for Somersault in 2004, and she shared a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast with the ensemble of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. The Abbie Cornish Jack Ryan role was a shift to a long-running series after years in features, and the interview touches on what it was like to join a franchise with such a long history.

Before the premiere, Cuse, Roland and Cornish discussed the series, its characters and what to expect from the first season. What follows draws on that conversation.

How do you relaunch Jack Ryan without the old stars?

The first question was the obvious one: how do you revive a character who has already had a run of famous leads? Cuse pointed out that the role has always been passed around. Alec Baldwin played Ryan once, Harrison Ford twice, Ben Affleck once and Chris Pine once, which means Krasinski is the fifth to try. In Cuse's view, the job of each actor is to make the part their own, and Krasinski has done that.

What Krasinski adds, he said, is humor and charm. Audiences know him as Jim from The Office, so the surprise is how physically capable he is. The series begins with Ryan as a believable analyst in the CIA's Terrorist Financing and Arms Division, writing reports, and follows his first experiences in the field. That trajectory, from desk to danger, is what the show borrows from the first book in the Jack Ryan series that the producers hope to adapt.

What does shooting for Amazon look like?

Cuse said the production felt like a film. The resources allowed them to shoot in cities around the world, on three continents, including three months in Morocco and stretches in Paris, Washington, D.C., and Montreal. He compared the result to an eight-hour movie, and said the money and resources removed many of the constraints that television usually imposes.

The production credits back him up. Season 1 filmed in Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Quebec, London, Paris and Chamonix, a list that reads like a movie schedule more than a cable one.

Cathy Mueller and the everyman appeal

Cornish said what excited her about Cathy in the first season was that her profession becomes relevant to the plot. A threat arises in which Cathy's intellect and expertise matter, so she is not only a partner in a romance. Cathy and Jack meet and begin dating, and for a while she does not know he works for the CIA because he cannot tell her.

Roland was asked whether Jack Ryan is still relevant three decades after Tom Clancy created him. His answer was about relatability. Where Jack Bauer, James Bond and Jason Bourne are professionals who seem equipped for every situation, Ryan is more of an everyman who gets in over his head and finds his way out through intelligence and not muscle. That difference, Roland argued, is a large part of the character's appeal. It is also a useful brief for the writers: when your hero cannot simply out-fight a problem, every scene has to find a clever way through it, and that is where the best moments of a spy story tend to come from. The same logic applies to Cornish's character, whose expertise is a plot tool of her own.

Jack Ryan on screen before Krasinski

Cuse listed these actors in the interview; the Amazon series made John Krasinski the fifth actor to play the character.

What the interview says about the series

The scale of the franchise helps explain the questions. Jack Ryan was created by Tom Clancy and introduced in The Hunt for Red October, the author's first novel, and he went on to anchor a shelf of bestsellers. A television adaptation inherits that history and also the expectation of a particular kind of story: geopolitical, procedural and driven by information as much as by gunfire. The producers appear to have embraced that expectation instead of resisting it.

Cuse's remark about humor is worth a second look. The earlier films treated Ryan as a serious, almost professorial hero, and the new series was positioned as lighter on its feet. Krasinski's comic reputation from The Office could have been a distraction, but Cuse argued it gave the audience a reason to see another side of an actor they thought they knew. That tension, between the familiar face and the unexpected physical work, is a quiet selling point of the season.

The series also moved quickly. Amazon announced a second season on April 24, 2018, months before the first aired, and the show went on to set season 2 in Venezuela, shooting partly in Bogotá. That kind of early commitment suggests how confident the streamer was in the format, and it fits Cuse's description of the production as a big-budget enterprise.

Three ideas run through the answers. First, the show treats Jack as a thinker. Every comparison to Bond or Bourne is made to point out how different he is, and the producers repeatedly return to analysis and intelligence as his main tools.

Second, the production sees itself as cinematic. The decision to call the series a movie for a streaming service reflects both pride and a reading of where television was heading in 2018. It is a claim the finished show tries to back up with location shooting and a global story.

Third, the people behind it have a track record together. Cuse and Roland worked on Lost, then The Returned, and now Jack Ryan, which makes this their third show together. Asked whether the twisty storytelling of Lost helped with an espionage thriller, Cuse gave a modest answer: he hopes everything he writes builds on what he has done before. He cited Aaron Sorkin, who said he has to believe his best script is the one he has not written yet.

For viewers deciding whether to watch, the interview describes a show that aims for the mood of the Clancy novels, with credible tradecraft and a lead who is more thoughtful than invincible. Anyone who prefers hard-edged action to analysis may find the pacing slower than a Bourne film, while fans of the books and of procedural spy stories are the intended audience. The cast, particularly Pierce as Greer and Cornish as Mueller, gives the show a grounded center.

Sources

• Jack Ryan (TV series), Wikipedia — Checked against: cast, showrunners and premiere date.