The star of Amazon's biggest action show is getting torched by his own fanbase.
Alan Ritchson, the hulking lead of Prime Video's hit series "Reacher," is staring down a massive wave of boycott threats from conservative viewers right as his fourth season kicks off. As reported, the actor built his massive following playing a patriotic ex-Army investigator who delivers brutal justice to bad guys. But his off-screen crusade against President Donald Trump has turned a huge chunk of that audience against him.
Here's the juicy part. Ritchson grew up deeply Catholic. Altar boy. Youth group president. Music minister. The whole nine yards. He described a strict religious household where faith wasn't optional. By all accounts, the guy could have been a right-wing hero.
Instead, he went nuclear on Trump-supporting Christians during a 2024 interview, calling modern believers "the most vitriolic tribe" and declaring their behavior "antithetical" to the teachings of Jesus. Then he dropped the real bombshell, calling Trump "a rapist and a con man" while blasting the Christian church for treating the president like "their poster child."
For the record, Donald Trump has never been criminally charged with or convicted of rape and has consistently denied every allegation of sexual misconduct.
But Ritchson wasn't finished. Not even close. During a July sit-down on Dax Shepard's "Armchair Expert" podcast, the actor unleashed a profanity-laden tirade accusing Trump of "r-ping the world" for personal enrichment. He claimed the White House was "in ruins" and that nobody was holding the president accountable. "I'm not going to let him go," Ritchson declared, adding that he hated seeing such behavior continue "unabated, unchecked, unresolved."
The conservative entertainment world fired back immediately. Kevin Sorbo, famous for playing Hercules, openly questioned Ritchson's intelligence. "You'd think he'd be smart enough to keep his mouth shut because fans of Reacher happen to also be right-wing," Sorbo wrote. Filmmaker Mike Binder piled on, suggesting Ritchson was desperately trying to impress Hollywood's liberal elite at the expense of the people actually watching his show. "So fabulously insane the way he acted," Binder wrote, adding that he felt worse for the studios bankrolling Ritchson's career than for the actor himself.
The timing of all this drama could not be worse for Amazon. Season four premiered on August 12th with three episodes, and new installments will roll out weekly through September 16th. The eight-episode run adapts Lee Child's novel "Gone Tomorrow" and follows the same formula that made the show a smash, with Ritchson's Jack Reacher wandering the country taking down criminals and corrupt power brokers.
The big question now is whether angry MAGA fans will actually follow through on their boycott threats or quietly tune in anyway. Hollywood has seen this movie before. Conservative viewers threaten to walk, then the numbers tell a different story. But Ritchson has gone so far, so loudly, and so repeatedly that this time might actually leave a mark on the ratings.
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