After 20 years in the business, Alan Ritchson is finally having his moment. The actor is perfectly suited to his starring role in Prime Video’s “Reacher,” so much so you’d swear he was engineered in a lab for the sole purpose of bringing Lee Child’s brawny blonde bruiser to life on the screen.

It didn’t come easy, though. After making some waves on “American Idol” and then popping up as Arthur Curry/Aquaman in a handful of “Smallville” episodes, Ritchson seemed primed to break out thanks to his role on the cult college football sitcom “Blue Mountain State.”

Instead, he spent most of the next decade serving as a third-tier player in various network shows and a handful of big-budget pictures.

Things might’ve gone very differently, had Ritchson landed the role of another blonde superhero beefcake. Not that long after being cast as the brash football captain Thad Castle on “Blue Mountain State,” the actor made a failed bid to play Thor Odinson in the then up-and-coming Marvel Cinematic Universe.

However, as Ritchson himself would tell you, it’s his own dang fault he missed out on the coveted part. “I didn’t take it seriously,” he admitted in an interview with Men’s Health.

“I was like, ‘They’ll throw me the part if I look like the guy; nobody really cares about acting.'” Instead, the film’s casting crew informed him he simply hadn’t shown “the craft” they were looking for (unlike his competitor and the future God of Thunder, Chris Hemsworth).

So, what do you do after losing out on one of the biggest roles of the decade? If you’re Ritchson, you go back to school.

Ritchson goes to acting school

Lionsgate

There are probably few things harder for an actor to hear than “You’re not good at acting.” Ritchson, to his credit, took the criticism to heart and began studying with an acting coach before joining an acting class taught by Deborah Aquila (the casting director of “The Shawshank Redemption,” “La La Land,” and the Best Picture Oscar-winning “CODA,” among many, many other movies).

“All I had to go on when he came in was — bless his heart, this man, I love him — he was so earnest and he really, really wanted to take the next step,” Aquila told Men’s Health. “He had done ‘Blue Mountain State,’ and I watched episodes of it. And I was scratching my head going, ‘How am I going to help this man?'”

As Aquila recalled it, Ritchson was all-in on the feedback she gave him upon accepting him into her class. Still, success continued to elude him as he tried and failed to score big roles in films like “The Hunger Games: Catching Fire” (where Sam Claflin beat him out for the part of Finnick Odair) and the TV series “Titans” (where he auditioned to play Dick Grayson/Robin, a role that ultimately went to Brenton Thwaites), having to instead settle for playing supporting characters.

“Titans” was an especially difficult hit for him to take. “I was so confident. I was like, ‘This is the best damn audition I’ve ever had in my life. There’s no way they can do this show without me,'” Ritchson wryly confessed. In those specific cases, he was also told he was too old for the parts, which dealt another strike to his confidence.

The role he’d been Reaching for

Prime Video

All those years of getting his hopes swatted down and suffering blows to his ego may have served Ritchson well when it came time to audition for “Reacher.” Having seen the worst of humanity and how easily institutions can be corrupted from his years as a special investigator in the military, Jack Reacher is a man who’s learned to move extra cautiously through the world by the time the series picks up (much like Ritchson at that point).

“That’s a thinking person, right? Because that person has seen stuff. That’s how the backstory serves you,” Aquila noted. Child echoed that thought when interviewed by Men’s Health:

“The physicality was dead on. [But] you could see him thinking; you could see him three seconds ahead of everybody else, just kind of patiently waiting for everybody else to catch up.”

Could Ritchson have worked as Thor? I think so. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to imagine him pulling off a mix of charisma, macho strutting, self-deprecating comedy, and, of course, pure sexiness similar to what Chris Hemsworth brought to the role.

But at the same time, the Jack Reacher character fits Ritchson so comfortably that it’s hard to argue things didn’t work out for the best. Who knows, though — perhaps somewhere out there in the multiverse, at this very moment, one of my own variants is speculating about their version of Chris Hemsworth being cast as the God of Thunder instead of Reacher.