Alan Ritchson Was Knocked Out for ‘a Day and a Half’ After Insisting on Doing This Stunt in The Reacher Finale

WARNING: This article contains spoilers for The Reacher season 3 finale.

Alan Ritchson shared that the final match-up in the Reacher season 3 finale really knocked him out.

Ritchson, who stars as Jack Reacher, told Entertainment Weekly that because he chose to perform his own stunts, the finale fight sequence wiped him out for a day and a half.

The 42-year-old actor told the outlet that the whole point of the scene is to watch his character, a retired army police officer, “get ragdolled for five minutes straight.”

“And I was like, ‘This is fun. I like that this is the idea for everybody right now.’ And I get the bright idea to shoot a stunt in a way, because I was like, ‘I want the audience to know that I’m doing this for us. I’m taking one for Reacher and we’re all in this together,’ ” he explained.

He confessed that everyone on set warned him about the safety risks, telling him “ ‘You’re going to get killed and we’re not going to do that because it’s going to hurt you too bad.’ “

But he insisted that he perform the stunt. “Reluctantly, they’re like, ‘You better not die because we said you’re going to die, and we tried to warn you.’ “

After he was “slammed through the table so hard,” Ritchson learned his lesson. Confessing that he thought he “went through it into the seventh circle of hell.”

“And I woke up a day and a half later. When I came to – I had to tell my kids that I felt great, because they were on set, and I didn’t want them to think that like, ‘Dad died and was going to not be okay,’ ” he said. “It was the worst few minutes of my life.”

He told the outlet that the scene took three weeks to film from start to finish.

“That was one, three-second beat in 28 minutes of content, just to give you an example of what my life was like for those three weeks,” he said. “It was a hoot.”

Ritchson previously told Entertainment Weekly that it was also challenging to film a “crazy” water sequence, when his character swam through tough waters to make a midnight escape from his undercover mission

“It was tough,” he said in the Feb. 20 interview. “That water work was pretty tricky, and stripping down and crawling across those cold, wet rocks naked was not the funnest for me and for just about anybody watching — but we did it because we love the show.”