Lee Child Interview on Reuters

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Lee Child Interview

Tuesday 8 June 2010

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTR...

[James]

Interesting interview. I've seen Lee Child at author events three or four times, and he's always very entertaining.

[Dorie]

Wow, who to play Reacher in a movie? That's a tough one. I'll bet Lee wishes he had some input on that.

[Carol/Bonadie]

Actually I heard him speak to this in a signing in Brookline, MA week before last. He said two things. One was that he once got cornered into commenting on this in a casual way, and regretted it. He actually doesn't have a preference for who should play Reacher, but he was in Australia and a journalist asked him "What about Hugh Jackman?" and he said "Sure, he'd be fine." Lee said to us "What was I going to do, insult an entire country by saying he'd be terrible?" Of course, it eventually was reported in Variety and his agent called him and said "never do that again!"
The other thing he said was that whatever actor gets chosen will have the opportunity to create Reacher in his own image for the millions of people who will never have picked up a Reacher book when they see the movie. His example was Clint Eastwood, who was noone's image of the Dirty Harry character when the movie was cast, but who came in and made the character his own.

Dorie wrote: "Wow, who to play Reacher in a movie? That's a tough one. I'll bet Lee wishes he had some input on that."