Olivier Richters vs Alan Ritchson: What Made Paulie Look Truly Massive in Reacher Season 3
UPLIFT IRON CLUBWhy Paulie Makes Reacher Look Small
Reacher is built around a simple visual rule: Alan Ritchson is usually the largest person in the room. Season 3 breaks that rule on purpose. Olivier Richters, the 7-foot-2 bodybuilder and actor known as “The Dutch Giant,” plays Paulie, and the effect is immediate because the size difference is not subtle enough to be explained by camera tricks alone. Prime Video's own cast material emphasized that Richters was one of the rare actors capable of making Ritchson look small.
Richters has been listed around 350 pounds for the role, while Ritchson is roughly 6-foot-3 and already carries an action-star level of muscle. That creates an unusual comparison: the viewer is not seeing a normal actor beside a giant bodybuilder. They are seeing a very large, muscular leading man beside someone nearly a foot taller who also has years of bodybuilding mass on his frame. The contrast makes Paulie look almost exaggerated even before costume, blocking and camera angle enter the equation.
Height is the first multiplier. Longer limbs and a larger skeletal frame create more total visual real estate for muscle. Then width adds a second multiplier. Richters is not simply tall and thin; his shoulders, torso, arms and legs are heavily developed. Finally, relative scale does the rest. Because audiences already understand Reacher as huge, seeing Paulie dwarf him creates a stronger impression than seeing Richters standing alone.
That is why trying to reduce the look to one number such as body weight misses the point. The effect comes from height, muscularity, proportion and comparison working together.
Alan Ritchson Was Already the Benchmark
The Paulie comparison only works because Ritchson himself is visibly powerful. For Reacher, he built a thick chest, shoulders, arms and back while keeping enough conditioning to move through long fight sequences. Earlier preparation for the role involved adding a substantial amount of body weight and training with a mix of bodybuilding work, calisthenics and conditioning. In most scenes, that is more than enough to make him dominate the frame.
Putting Richters beside him changes the reference point. Ritchson's muscularity remains obvious, but his normal “big man” proportions are suddenly contrasted with a frame that is eleven inches taller. The shoulder line sits higher, the arms hang longer, and the overall mass occupies more of the shot. Even if two people have similarly developed muscles relative to their own frames, the taller athlete can look dramatically larger in absolute terms.
This is useful for lifters because it illustrates why physique comparisons are often misleading. A six-foot-three athlete and a seven-foot-two athlete can train intelligently and look muscular, yet their scale will never read the same. Bone lengths, joint structure, torso dimensions and total body mass change the visual outcome. Training can maximize your frame; it cannot replace it with somebody else's.
Instead of chasing another person's scale, use the comparison to identify trainable features: shoulder width, upper-back thickness, arm size, posture and leanness. Those qualities can change dramatically even when height cannot.
How Richters Built Bodybuilding Mass
Richters' physique was built through bodybuilding long before Reacher. In interviews around Season 3, he has described experimenting with different splits before finding that somewhat lower volume and higher intensity worked well for him. Men's Health documented a back-and-biceps session built around familiar movements such as wide-grip pulldowns, seated cable rows and barbell curls, generally taken hard in moderate rep ranges.
The lesson is not that everyone should copy his exact split. It is that giant physiques are still built from ordinary movement patterns repeated for years. A vertical pull develops the lats, a row adds mid-back density, curls add direct elbow-flexor volume, and pressing work fills the chest and shoulders. There is no special seven-foot-two exercise. The exceptional outcome comes from the athlete, the years invested, the food required to support that frame and the consistency of progressive training.
Richters also had to manage the conflict between bodybuilding and acting. During Reacher's stunt-heavy preparation, he has said the physical demands of fight practice forced him to cut gym volume substantially. That is a useful reminder that total workload matters. If you suddenly add hours of sport, conditioning or martial-arts practice, keeping your normal bodybuilding volume unchanged is not automatically tougher; it can simply reduce recovery.
For a normal lifter, the practical version is simple: keep a few high-value exercises, train them hard, and reduce redundant volume when outside demands rise. Ten productive sets that recover well beat twenty sets that make every session worse.
What Actually Creates the “Massive” Look
If your goal is to look substantially bigger without pretending you can recreate Richters' height, focus on the areas that change silhouette. Side delts widen the shoulders. Lats broaden the torso. Upper back and traps add thickness around the neck and shoulders. Arms fill the space between shoulder and forearm. Quads and glutes keep the lower body proportional. Loaded carries can tie the whole package together by training grip, traps, trunk stability and the ability to move with weight.
That does not require a complicated program. Across the week, include a heavy press, a vertical pull, a row, a squat or leg press, a hip hinge, lateral raises, curls and triceps work. Add carries if you enjoy them. Most muscle can be built with two exposures per week and roughly six to twelve hard sets per muscle group to start, adjusted upward or downward based on progress and recovery.
Leanness also changes perceived size. A moderately lean physique can show shoulder caps, arm separation and upper-back detail that make the same body weight look more muscular. But getting excessively lean can flatten the look and reduce training performance. For an action-hero aesthetic, being muscular and athletic usually matters more than maintaining contest-level definition.
Posture and clothing matter on screen too, but they cannot create the underlying structure. A fitted shirt on a thick upper back emphasizes scale; it does not manufacture it. Build the frame first, then let presentation amplify what is already there.
A Practical “Big Man” Training Template
A four-day upper/lower structure is a straightforward way to pursue the same broad qualities. Upper day one can use incline pressing, pulldowns, chest-supported rows, lateral raises and arms. Lower day one can use squats, Romanian deadlifts, split squats and calves. Upper day two can switch to flat pressing, pull-ups or another pulldown, a heavier row, rear delts and arms. Lower day two can use a leg press or front squat, a hinge, hamstring curls and loaded carries.
Keep most compound lifts between six and twelve reps and isolation work between ten and twenty. Use controlled technique and finish most sets with one or two clean reps still available. Progress by adding reps until the top of the range is reached, then add the smallest practical amount of load. That gives you a repeatable system rather than a collection of heroic one-off workouts.
If you also do combat sports, hard conditioning or physically demanding work, reduce lifting volume before you reduce training quality. Richters' own Reacher preparation is a good example: the body does not distinguish between “gym fatigue” and “stunt fatigue.” It only has a finite recovery budget.
Nutrition should match the goal. A modest calorie surplus supports muscle gain; a modest deficit reveals more definition. You do not need the extreme food intake required to maintain a seven-foot-two, 300-plus-pound frame, and attempting to imitate it would make no sense. Scale the plan to your body, activity and rate of progress.
Paulie looks enormous because Olivier Richters is enormous. But the useful training lesson is not “be seven foot two.” It is to maximize your own frame: build shoulders, lats, back, arms and legs, get stronger at repeatable basics, and manage recovery well enough to keep improving for years.
For taller lifters especially, exercise selection may need small adjustments. Long femurs can make a high-bar squat feel very different than it does for a shorter athlete, and long arms can change pressing and pulling mechanics. Use machines, stance changes, heel elevation or different grips when they allow the target muscle to work through a strong range without joint irritation. Proportions affect technique; they do not excuse avoiding progressive training.
Track progress with more than scale weight. Measurements at the shoulders, chest, arms, thighs and waist, plus photos under similar lighting, will tell you whether added body weight is actually changing the silhouette you care about. Strength trends provide another check: if body weight rises while performance and measurements stay flat, more food alone is not solving the problem.
The same principle applies to exercise selection: choose movements that let your structure express strength safely. A machine press or chest-supported row is not less serious than a free-weight version if it lets you load the target muscles harder and recover better. Consistency wins the size contest long before novelty does.
Build patiently, train hard, and let your own frame set the scale.
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