28 Years Later, Alan Ritchson’s Favorite Reacher Book Still Has the Most Disturbingly Racist Villain

Alan Ritchson has spent years championing Die Trying, and his favorite Jack Reacher novel apparently came closer to television than fans knew. Twenty-eight years after Lee Child published the book in 1998, Ritchson revealed that he had once gotten its adaptation approved. Responding to a fan on Threads asking for the story where Reacher battles a white supremacist militia, he wrote (via Threads):

Asked again about his favorite during a 2025 interview, he told Men’s Journal: 

Ritchson did not identify the politician or explain why the plan fell apart. What makes the missed adaptation even more intriguing is its antagonist: Beau Borken, the vicious leader of a racist separatist militia that abducts Reacher and FBI agent Holly Johnson. Kirkus Reviews called Borken a “psychopathically vicious neo-Nazi militia leader.”

Beau Borken Makes Die Trying Particularly Noxious

Alan Ritchson as Jack Reacher in Reacher | Credits: Prime Video

Die Trying begins without giving Reacher time to find trouble himself. While helping an injured woman with her dry cleaning in Chicago, he is abducted alongside her and thrown into a van. She turns out to be FBI agent Holly Johnson, daughter of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and goddaughter of the U.S. president.

Their captors eventually deliver them to Borken’s fortified Montana compound. Borken is no garden-variety criminal chasing money. He leads an extremist militia that wants its territory severed from the United States and reserved for white people. A retrospective review at The Nature of Things describes his organization as an “extremely violent, racist, secessionist” movement whose worldview includes racial grievance, anti-government paranoia, and conspiracy theories about a global takeover.

Child makes Borken grotesque beyond his ideology. He rules through intimidation and murder, while his grandiose speeches betray a man convinced of his own intellectual supremacy. Kirkus recounts his brutality toward workers and his plan involving a hijacked Army missile unit, with Holly imprisoned inside a cell rigged with explosives. The racism is therefore not incidental window dressing around another criminal scheme. It is embedded in the society Borken wants to create.

That separates him from many Reacher adversaries motivated primarily by money, trafficking, revenge, or self-preservation. The book arrived amid the militia anxieties of 1990s America, making Borken’s compound more than an extravagant lair for Reacher to demolish. Twenty-eight years later, the rhetoric remains deliberately rancid.

Alan Ritchson Has Wanted Die Trying for Years

Credits: Prime Video

Alan Ritchson’s attachment to Die Trying predates the current Reacher juggernaut. While promoting Season 1 in 2022, he told Slashfilm that he had read all 24 Reacher books then available to him and singled out the second novel as one he “desperately” wanted to bring to television. “I hope at some point we get to do ‘Die Trying,’” he said, praising its attributes as particularly suitable for adaptation.

His opinion survived the intervening seasons. During a 2023 interview with SlashFilm, Ritchson was reminded that he had previously selected Die Trying as his favorite. His answer was emphatic and economical: “Still.” He explained that Reacher stories broadly fall into two camps: those where he walks into trouble and those where he gets dragged into it. Ritchson prefers the latter, arguing that stories such as Die Trying, where Reacher is reluctantly sucked into danger, are “more true to who he is” because “Reacher just wants to be left alone.”

Ritchson doubled down during a 2024 interview with BroBible, calling Die Trying “personally my favorite book.” He also offered a tantalizing tease about its television prospects: 

His enthusiasm has therefore survived multiple Reacher seasons rather than being an offhand answer from the show’s early days. Would Die Trying make a great future Reacher season, and could Beau Borken become the show’s most detestable villain? Tell us in the comments and follow FandomWire for more updates.