How Reacher (Sorta) Found A Book-Perfect Estate For Season 3: 'That Location Is A Unicorn!'

If you read Lee Child's seventh Jack Reacher novel, Persuader, on which Season 3 of the hit Prime Video series is based, you have to be impressed with how perfectly Zachary Beck's remote Maine estate is depicted. Long driveway, guard house and handy/sometimes-ominous shoreline included.

It looks practically torn from the pages of the novel that described it. It's almost too spot-on to be real.

That's because it kinda isn't.

In speaking with Reacher star and executive producer Alan Ritchson this week, I remarked on how incredibly faithful (save for a nitpick or three) Season 3 is to the source material — Beck's estate included.

"Funny you mention that...," Ritchson responded with a smile. "You have no idea how hard it was to put that together."

The bulk of the location is "played by" Escarpment House, a 14,000 sq. ft. luxury estate "nestled in the beautiful Pulpit Ridge area of Caledon," a town in the Greater Toronto Area of Ontario, Canada. The luxury villa boasts five bedrooms (each with en-suite bathrooms), a loft space that includes five additional beds, a pool, hot tub, steam room, gym, billiards table, home theater and meeting spaces.

It just doesn't have a guard house (let alone one with a machine gun chained to the ceiling)...sit on a foreboding shoreline... or have a violent nearby eddy that can conveniently whisk dead bodies out to sea.

"There was scouting for months, and helicopter trips up the entire East Coast of the United States and Canada," to find the right kind of mansion in the right kind of location, Ritchson shared. In the end, though, "We ended up having to cobble together that house with Newfoundland and coastlines from all over the world, and composite together multiple locations" in order to make it novel-accurate and serve all the storyline needs. "We were making two-hour drives to this house from where we film in Toronto, just to get the pieces that we needed."

In other words, the location as described in Persuader "is a unicorn that still doesn't exist," Ritchson reported.

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