John Krasinski Says Jack Ryan's Season 3 Journey Is All About Instinct Versus The CIA's Moral Compromises - Exclusive
Jack Ryan, a CIA analyst and frequent field agent, is one of Tom Clancy's most enduring characters. A slew of prior adaptations have seen Jack Ryan at various points in his career, but Season 3 of the Amazon series finds Jack (here, John Krasinski) taking on one of his toughest challenges yet. Russian Soviet Union loyalists resurrect the Sokol Project, a heretofore unused project to restart Soviet power. The conspirators seek to use a carefully planned series of assassinations and nuclear armament to those ends, and the CIA unsurprisingly gets involved, with Jack Ryan involved in a key operation.
The op goes awry, finding Ryan scapegoated and under fire from the CIA while forced to go on the lam, trying to get to the bottom of the conspiracy. With some clandestine help from James Greer (Wendell Pierce) and otherwise on the run from the organization he's called home, Ryan must get to the bottom of the mystery with little other than his instincts to guide him. In a new exclusive Looper interview, John Krasinski goes into detail about the crux of the new season. A conflict between Ryan's interests and the moral compromises of the CIA drives Season 3, illuminating its operations in more depth than any season thus far.
Working outside the system
The Amazon series alone has seen Jack Ryan go through a tremendous amount of growth over the prior two seasons. Season 3, John Krasinski explains in the interview, is a clear "culmination of the first two seasons and how Jack's been learning a lot about how things operate." In Season 1, Ryan "says he's just an analyst ... He sees the world in black and white," Krasinski elaborates. "There's only right and wrong."
The character continues to evolve, and he's helped along by Greer as the seasons progress. "In Season 2, Greer shows him very clearly that the world does not operate in black and white," Krasinski clarifies. "The world's more operating in the gray. That's something that Jack was very uncomfortable with and then had to come to terms with that."
Season 3 brings that arc to completion by forcing Ryan to come to terms with the complexity of his own organization. Here, "He's now not only learned that the world operates in gray, but perhaps the CIA does too — not that the CIA is nefarious in any way, but that in order to get the job done, you may have to make sacrifices and moral compromises that you weren't planning to," Krasinski notes. With nowhere else to turn, there is a "doubling and tripling down on his instinct, which has gotten him in trouble in the past," Krasinski says, as Ryan has to make hard moral choices on instinct alone.
Season 3 of "Jack Ryan" is available now on Prime Video.