His days at Dunder Mifflin are over.
John Krasinski has gone from selling paper products to fighting off terrorist in the first trailer for Amazon Prime’s exclusive new series Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan. Yes, they included the Tom Clancy part in the actual title itself and no, we don’t know why either.
Based on the character created by Clancy, and having been portrayed multiple times by different actors in the past, the former Office star will be the next to portray the CIA analyst. The series will be eight-episode first season that follows Ryan as he’s forced to get his hands dirty in his first field assignment.
Director and executive producer Daniel Sackheim told IndieWire last July: “It’s an original story, so it’s not an adaptation of any of the novels. But I think it’s inspired in the same way as the Harrison Ford movies.”
Sackheim also said: “In the first episode, when we meet Jack Ryan, he’s an analyst. He kind of discovers something and gets roped into participating in the field. Little by little by little, he becomes an operative. So the first season is really following the arc of a guy learning to be a CIA agent, or what the CIA calls an operative vs. an analyst.”
In the past, the character of Jack Ryan has been portrayed by Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October (1990), Harrison Ford in Patriot Games (1992) and Clear and Present Danger (1994), Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears (2002) and Chris Pine in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014).
Office jokes aside, this isn’t the first time Krasinski has broken out into more dramatic acting. For a long time he was in talks to play Steve Rodgers himself in Captain America, and he’s appeared in serious roles in 13 Hours, Promised Land and this summer’s Detroit.
Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan will be released to Amazon Prime some time during 2018. Honestly, if the show just gives us a few moments where Krasinski looks at the camera and gives us some classic Jim Halpert faces, it’ll be more than enough for us.
Watch the trailer here: