“It made me hate my life”: the role Alan Ritchson wishes he’d never played
It’s hard not to have noticed Alan Ritchson over the past few years, mainly because he’s massive.
The gigantic actor has been filling out screens as the titular protagonist of Amazon Prime’s Reacher since 2022, fulfilling the role of the bulky action hero much more efficiently than Tom Cruise did in that crap film.
Before he was punching bad guys to death on a regular basis, Ritchson bopped around a few notable projects, first rising to prominence on the TV show Smallville, portraying a younger version of Aquaman. His history with massive franchises doesn’t stop there, as he played a tribute in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and made his debut in the Fast and Furious series in Fast X, despite putting his foot in it with Vin Diesel on the first day of shooting.
One franchise that you might not associate him with is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, because he was smothered in CGI the entire time.
He played Raphael in the 2014 big-screen version of the classic series, providing both the motion capture and the voice for the red mask-wearing reptile (he does wear the red one, right?) in Jonathan Liebesman’s action romp, but unfortunately, as he told Collider, he didn’t enjoy it.
“It made me hate life so much, so much,” he said, “They were so bad to us, and they broke so many promises…I said no, I didn’t want to do it because I’m going to waste years of my life, the best years of my career, on something that nobody’s even going to know that I’m a part of.”
Ritchson had initially shown an interest in the Turtles because of his young son, but also expressed his fears to the production, who assured him that he would be taken care of. “They’re like, ‘No, no, this is a whole new, live-action, one-to-one, you move, they move, you’re just as much a part of this as anybody else’,” he continued, “‘We’re really going to get you out there’.” Needless to say, this didn’t happen.
The motion-capture actors were consistently treated like second fiddles on set, with most of the attention on the live-action ‘stars’ like Megan Fox and Will Arnett. Two of them, Pete Ploszek and Danny Woodburn, had their voices dubbed by Johnny Knoxville and Tony Shalhoub, respectively, and the actors playing the turtles, the main draw of the movie, weren’t given the opportunity to do any press for the movie, which directly contradicted what they had been promised before filming began. Ritchson tried to get out of reprising his role for the sequel, Out of the Shadows, but was tied to his contract.
The movie was produced by Michael Bay, who doesn’t have the best reputation for getting along with even the major stars of his films, making the whole thing sound like a giant mess. I’m very glad that Ritchson was able to eventually hit it big on his own, and I bet he was absolutely thrilled when the two Turtles movies got ripped to shreds by critics.
