In Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books, it’s clear that Reacher is a total man-mountain – a gigantic specimen who should make pretty much anyone else in the room cower before his serious stature. And it’s near-miraculous that, for Prime Video’s Reacher series, they found an actor as hulking as Alan Ritchson to play him. But for Season 3, the creators of Reacher faced an even bigger feat – literally. In adapting Child’s novel Persuader, they needed to find someone even more physically imposing than Ritchson to play the villainous Paulie – a guy so gigantic, he makes Reacher look like an everyman.

Enter Dutch actor Olivier Richters, who stands at 7’ 2”, his Paulie towering over Reacher – as seen in the exclusive image above. Yes, the two will go toe-to-toe in an epic Season 3 fight, and the results promise to be thunderous. “The effort they put into Reacher versus Paulie is astonishing,” Richters tells Empire of their bruising on-screen brawl. “We might be a little bit immortal in the fight, because it continues for so long.” To prepare for the scene, Richters trained for five hours a day, and consumed 7,000 calories to maintain his weight. It was worth every effort. “I’m not going to say we’re going to win an Oscar for the fight scene, but it’s going to be spectacular,” Richters enthuses.

While Paulie and Reacher are throwing punches in front of the camera, behind the scenes it’s all admiration. “I said to [Alan] as a joke, but it’s kind of true, that he’s really Reacher in real life,” says Richters. “He has so many lines to learn, he has to perform, he has to eat continuously, he has to show up for the fight-training after filming all day. It’s inhuman, what he does. It’s a level I can only dream of.” Big respect. Literally.

Read Empire’s full Reacher Season 3 story, speaking to Olivier Richters, in the Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning issue – on sale Thursday 13 February. Order a copy online here. Reacher Season 3 comes to Prime Video from 20 February.