Reacher's Crew Built The Entire Town Of Margrave In The Middle Of A Cornfield
Season 1 of "Reacher" was a huge hit for Amazon, which is just as well considering the amount of work that went into making the show. When the series based on Lee Child's popular Jack Reacher books hit Prime Video, it instantly smashed Amazon streaming records. All of which suggested that leaving behind Tom Cruise, who'd starred in two movies based on the novels, and starting anew was a shrewd move on Child's part.
"Reacher" treated the two Cruise films as if they never happened, casting new lead Alan Ritchson and taking Child's tales of a traveling ex-military policeman who can't help but find trouble into the streaming age. Adapting the very first Jack Reacher novel, "Killing Floor," the first season followed the titular former Army officer as he visited the fictional small town of Margrave, Georgia, where he very quickly uncovers some sinister corruption at the heart of the town and naturally manages to fix everything before hitchhiking on to his next adventure.
All of this must have sounded great to the execs at Prime Video. But right when Child thought he'd got his character's on-screen return all figured out, the pandemic hit, prompting "Reacher" showrunner Nick Santora and his production crew to pivot ahead of filming. The biggest change made before the cameras were allowed to roll was scrapping plans to shoot on location in Georgia and heading up to Canada, where believe it or not, the "Reacher" crew built the entire town of Margrave from scratch.
Georgia by way of Ontario
Margrave was envisioned as a typical American small town. But small though it was, building the entire thing was far from a simple process.
After being forced to leave Georgia behind, Santora and company settled on Pickering, Ontario as the location to build their imagined town. An outer suburb of Toronto, Pickering provided the kind of isolated terrain the crew was looking for to ensure they controlled their set and kept the risk of COVID exposure as low as possible. As Drew Brown, executive vice president of production at Skydance Television, told The Hollywood Reporter, "We pivoted to Toronto, where there were fewer COVID-19 cases and where we would be able to build a replica Georgia town — and fully control it."
Led by production designer Patricio M. Farrell, the "Reacher" crew started building the 23-acre town of Margrave on a corn field amid 90 acres of rural land. The finished backlot featured 30 stores and shops, including the famous diner that Reacher first visits when he arrives in Margrave. The crew also built the police station and town hall, the main square in the town center where Reacher and Willa Fitzgerald's Roscoe bid each other adieu, and made the whole set fully expandable. What's more, they also reinforced the facades of the buildings with solid steel and exterior siding, ensuring the whole set would stand firm for years to come. This is just as well considering Skydance and production services company William F. White International agreed on a deal with the city of Pickering to keep the backlot running, with William F. White overseeing the operation of the site through December 2026. Not that Jack Reacher will need it, considering "Reacher" season 2 looks set to take place primarily in New York City.
'You feel like you're in it'
One person who remained thoroughly impressed with the Margrave set was Alan Ritchson himself. The leading man spoke to IMDB about his memories of shooting on the backlot — the biggest in Canada, according to The Hollywood Reporter — recalling the level of detail Patricio M. Farrell managed to include:
"We were way outside of Toronto. There's a cornfield, you drive through the corn, and then all of a sudden you're in Margrave and it opens up like it's Pleasantville, just all of a sudden. And it's real! You can walk in every shop, there's the candy shop that I used to steal candy from. Margrave is like a real thing in the middle of a cornfield. So, as soon as you cross the threshold of corn, to answer your question, you feel like you're in it, you feel like you're there."
The construction of an entire town, though a necessity given the pandemic, must have made things a lot easier for Nick Santora and his crew — allowing for a level of control that recalls Stanley Kubrick overseeing the production of "Eyes Wide Shut" on his meticulously recreated New York City streets at the UK's Pinewood Studios. In this case, however, Margrave remains standing and has already been used by other productions. Whether Reacher will return in forthcoming seasons remains to be seen. With the Jack Reacher novels all focusing on the itinerant hero in various different places, it seems unlikely, but then it's not as if the crew has to rebuild it.
Perhaps Reacher could make a quick stopover in Margrave and Willa Fitzgerald's Roscoe could return after all.