Reacher's Alan Ritchson admits he wants to be a big, beefy Batman

Amazon’s resident ass kicker Jack Reacher isn’t all that far off from being a superhero as-is—especially not as played by Reacher star Alan Ritchson, a man whose biggest issue, most of the time, is making it look at least halfway plausible that he could lose the numerous bloody brawls his character gets into. So it’s not all that surprising to hear that Ritchson has some genuine superhero ambitions of his own… even if his hero of choice is, if we’re being honest, a little hard for us to imagine.

“I want to be Bruce Wayne!” Ritchson declared in a recent (very cute) interview with THR, when asked the frankly absurd question of whether he’d want to play Batman or The Joker. (We can’t even begin to imagine the latter; just doesn’t fit in our brains.) And, yes, it’s very easy to draw parallels between Reacher and The Batman—both of whom fight with their brains as much as their fists, and have a very liberal attitude toward hospitalizing people who make bad decisions re: trying to shoot them. There’s a natural fit there, undeniably—and yet we can’t help imagining Ritchson-as-Dark-Knight emerging from the shadows for the first time…and hearing “Holy shit, is that giant, mega-buff billionaire Bruce Wayne in a bat costume?”

(The irony, of course, being that Ritchson was up for the most Alan Ritchson-obvious superhero role in the past—Marvel’s Thor—and, by his own account, totally blew it by not taking the audition seriously.)

But maybe we’re just being small minded (everyone is, in comparison to the 6'3" Ritchson!), because we can absolutely see him having fun in the role. (The calm, almost unflappable approach he brings to violence on Reacher would actually be pretty fantastic in a superhero flick.) Later in the interview, though, he does note that he’s not very good at staying up late—and notes that his most beloved Christian Bale film role is apparently Newsies—so we don’t know how well he’ll actually adapt to being a creature of the night.

That being said, we loaded up a 10-minute Prime Video compilation of him just kicking unholy ass on Reacher while writing this article and now we can’t stop watching it, so what the fuck do we know? Bring on the big, beefy Batman.