Five different actors have stepped into the role of Tom Clancy’s most enduring hero, Jack Ryan, and not one of them played him the same way. Clancy’s Ryan is a very different character in the spy genre, an intellectual hero, a CIA analyst, historian, and family man. He is not someone who shoots first and asks questions later, which makes casting actors to play him a little tricky. Names like Daniel Craig could easily step into the shoes of James Bond, but it takes something more to become the brains of the spy game, someone who would rather solve puzzles than fight terrorists. This is likely why Jack Ryan is one of Hollywood’s most recast leading roles, with the movies and TV shows showing him at wildly different points in his career.
From his big screen debut in The Hunt for Red October to his multi-season Prime Video series, here are the five men who played Jack Ryan, and a look at their impact on the character.
Ben Affleck had the worst luck of any Jack Ryan actor. He took on the role for the movie The Sum of All Fears, replacing Harrison Ford and taking Ryan back to his younger days as an up-and-coming CIA analyst, rather than the senior official Ford played. However, there was one huge problem with the story, thanks to real-world issues. Ryan had to face off with European neo-Nazi conspirators as they smuggled a nuclear bomb into Baltimore. This movie was released in May 2002, just nine months after 9/11.
That was too soon. The second the terrorist bomb exploded during the movie, The Sum of All Fears struggled to hold onto viewers. The movie only has a 58% Rotten Tomatoes score and an even lower 49% score from the audience. It made $193 million, which made it a financial success, but no one was ready for more from Jack Ryan after 9/11, and Affleck was a one-and-done in the role.
In 2014, Paramount was ready to try a new Jack Ryan movie, 12 years after the disappointment of The Sum of All Fears. However, the studio still felt it was important to have a young Ryan at the start of his career, and in the reboot, Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, the studio cast Chris Pine in the role. This was the fourth actor in the role, but the problem is that it was the first movie not based on a Tom Clancy novel.
As an original story, this had to live up to the world Clancy had created, and Pine wasn’t a big enough star to help carry the load. This was Ryan’s origin story, with him becoming a Marine after 9/11 and then being recruited by the CIA after he was badly wounded when a helicopter he was in was shot down. His mission here is to stop a Russian plot to crash the United States economy. It works as a Ryan story, but it failed to live up to the previous movies and remains an unremarkable entry, ending the franchise’s reboot attempt.
The first Jack Ryan actor is the most forgotten one, but he was in what might be the best movie in the entire franchise. The Hunt for Red October arrived in 1990 as the first time Jack Ryan was on the big screen, and the movie was spectacular. However, while Alec Baldwin was solid as Jack Ryan in the first appearance of the character, it was Sean Connery who stole the show as the rogue Soviet submarine captain Marko Ramius.
The movie follows Ramius as he heads toward the United States in an advanced ballistic missile submarine to defect, but the U.S. government believes he is heading there to attack. It is up to Ryan to convince the government to trust Ramius and take the gift he is bringing, and not to attack him upon entry into U.S. waters. The movie was very loyal to the novel, and this is a film for military fans because the technical and submarine details are spot-on here. Baldwin was really good as Ryan, but he was just overshadowed by his co-star.
John Krasinski has come a long way from his days as a comedy star on The Office. In 2018, he proved he was ready for action roles when he took on the character of Jack Ryan in the Prime Video series, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. When the series started, Ryan was a desk-bound CIA financial analyst who flagged suspicious bank transfers and was pulled into the field to hunt rising terrorist leader Suleiman across Europe and the Middle East. As the series wore on, he was pulled into more of the action.
Krasinski played Ryan longer than any other actor, appearing in four seasons of the Prime Video series and then starring in a follow-up movie called Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War. Each season of the series received better reviews, and Krasinski’s everyman persona drew praise, as he was able to balance Ryan’s analytic side and his willingness to throw down when needed.
The best actor to ever play Jack Ryan is Harrison Ford. He took on the role in two movies, first in 1992’s Patriot Games and then in 1994’s Clear and Present Danger. Unlike every other Jack Ryan movie, these showed him as an older man. In the first movie, he is a former CIA analyst on a family trip to London who foils a terrorist attack and then fights to protect his family. In the second, he is promoted to Acting Deputy Director of Intelligence and uncovers an illegal covert war the US government is secretly waging against a Colombian drug cartel.
These two movies followed Ford’s rise to fame as Han Solo in the Star Wars franchise and Indiana Jones. This gives him another franchise, and while it only lasted for two movies, Ford delivered one of the best performances of Jack Ryan ever to appear in film or on television. He made Jack Ryan a household name and is the actor who best inhabited the role.
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