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A reprise of the role of book-smart CIA operative Jack Ryan seems certain for Alec Baldwin after the character’s origin in the 1990 film adaptation of Tom Clancy bestseller The Hunt for Red October. The film has grossed more than $200 million worldwide and four successful print sequels are waiting in the wings. Baldwin is also in negotiations to reprise his role as Ryan, for an estimated $10 million, according to The New York Times. A few decades later Harrison Ford was chosen instead to play the role in the 1992’s Patriot Games, Baldwin bitterly recounted what happened and shared harsh words about his replacement. Read on to learn more about the drama surrounding the iconic character who was pitted against two of the biggest leading men of the 1990s.
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While in 1992 NYT story reports that Baldwin lost the role after “deciding on a dangerous game of chicken” with Paramount Pictures, the studio producing Patriotic Gameson his plans to star in a Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, a 2011 entry on his HuffPost blog on the subject of studio politics revealed more. Discussing the reason for leaving the franchise, Baldwin wrote, “Mostly, I gave half-truths as an answer, something about scheduling conflicts and so on. But the truth is that the studio cut my throat. “
Baldwin explained how he was on his way home to visit his mother following her breast cancer diagnosis when he received a call from The Hunt for Red October director John McTiernan. (The filmmaker did not sign on to direct Patriot Games, in part because of its focus on Irish politics and his own Irish-American background, according to Den of Geek.) The actor wrote that the director informed him that “a very popular movie star” had dropped out of the latest McTiernan project to appear. in the very role Baldwin talks about making a comeback. Although Baldwin doesn’t name him in the blog, that star is obviously Ford, fresh off the success of Indiana Jones movies—and to Paramount Pictures who allegedly owed him a favor after pulling the plug on the never-before-made action film Night Ride Down.
“John even told me that Paramount owed the actor a large sum of money for a greenlit film that had broken before, and that pushing me aside would help to alleviate that debt and put someone with greater power at the box office than I. the role,” Baldwin wrote on his blog. “I sat there kind of dumbfounded because not only was I in active negotiations with Paramount, but for them to negotiate at the same time with another actor was illegal.”
Perceiving the stalled negotiations now as “a way to break” him from the film, Baldwin said that only then did he choose to commit to A Streetcar Named Desire.
Although the franchise seemed poised to cement Baldwin as one of Hollywood’s top leading men, it fizzled out—along with reputation-damaging reports of bad behavior on the set of the Disney flop The Marrying Man—put the actor on shaky ground that led him to fire his agent and lament his career, “I’m starting over,” according to a report by Entertainment Weekly in 1991. He was relatively stable with a memorable performance in 1992’s critically acclaimed box office failure Glengarry Glen Rossbut it was 11 years before he received his first Oscar nomination.
Despite various performances over the coming decades, including his award-winning run as Jack Donaghy on NBC’s 30 Stones, Baldwin never really recaptured the lost potential of the Jack Ryan franchise. Still, he didn’t seem remorseful in his 2011 blog entry, writing, “A lot changed in my life with that decision. And I do not regret it.”
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Baldwin expressed support for the actors behind several subsequent iterations of Jack Ryan. In his 2017 memoir However (via USA Today), he called Ben Affleckhis Pearl Harbor co-star with Ryan in the 2002’s The Sum of All Fears, “a prince.” Then, in 2019, he described John Krasinskithe star of the Amazon Prime TV series, Jack Ryan by Tom Clancyas “a friend” to People.
In the same memoir, however, Baldwin says nothing about those involved Patriot Games. He called the director Phillip Noyce a “marginal talent” and openly shared his disdain for Ford, whom he claimed offered an unsympathetic “[expletive] to him,” when McTiernan told him that Baldwin was still in talks to reprise Jack Ryan. Baldwin also insisted that Ford had not recovered from not winning the Oscar and recounted seeing him in person and not was impressed. “I realized then that movies really enhance certain actors, making them seem like something they really aren’t,” The Leave star wrote. “Ford, in person, was a small man, short, curly, and vague, whose soft voice seemed to come from behind a door.”
For his part, Ford has never really commented on the casting, saying only that he aims to play his role by hinting at the character’s underlying conflicts. however, David Kirkpatrick, a studio executive whom Baldwin characterized as “a beady-eyed, untalented too who seemed like he was up to something” in his 2011 blog entry, offered a response to Baldwin’s version of what went down. Beginning with an empathetic lament over the creatives’ “cosmic struggle,” Kirkpatrick wrote on his own personal blog that choosing Ford “over a lesser star Alec Baldwin” stemmed from a trust he and Ford built while working on previous movie. Claiming that they “parted ways” after Baldwin disapproved of the script, she wrote that the Hunt for Red October actor “would have been a great Jack Ryan if only there was one [been] trust between everyone.” Meanwhile, Ford would reprise the role in 1994’s Clear and blatant disaster before giving it to Affleck eight years later.
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