Tradecraft: Abbie Cornish is Jack Ryan's Latest Wife

Deadline reports that Australian actress Abbie Cornish (Bright Star) will be the fifth actress (counting a non-speaking walk-on by Gates McFadden in The Hunt for Red October) to play Jack Ryan's wife, Cathy Ryan. Although at this stage in their relationship, she will still be Cathy Muller—as she was in The Sum of All Fears (as played by Bridget Moynahan) and Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (Keira Knightley), a reminder of how many times this series has been rebooted. (The trade actually spells her name "Mueller." I'm not sure if this is a typo or a departure.) While in the Tom Clancy books Ryan's wife was a surgeon, according to the trade she will be slightly reimagined in the new Amazon TV series Jack Ryan as "a doctor specializing in infectious diseases." The article goes on to describe the character as "intelligent, competitive, a rising star in the medical world and Jack’s love interest." To date, Cathy Ryan was probably most memorably played by Anne Archer in the two Harrison Ford Ryan movies in the Nineties.

As previously reported, the 10-episode straight-to-series Amazon drama stars John Krasinski as the titular hero. It hails from the Lost duo of co-showrunner Carlton Cuse (The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.) and writer (and, like Ryan, former Marine) Graham Roland. Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes, Skydance Media and Paramount TV co-produce. The first season will be an original storyline about Ryan's early days at CIA, though from the trade's description it sounds as if it will incorporate elements of Clancy's Patriot Games: "Jack Ryan is a reinvention with a modern sensibility of the famed and lauded Tom Clancy hero. It centers on Jack Ryan (Krasinski), an up-and-coming CIA analyst thrust into a dangerous field assignment for the first time. The series follows Ryan as he uncovers a pattern in terrorist communication that launches him into the center of a dangerous gambit with a new breed of terrorism that threatens destruction on a global scale." Will his report on this pattern in terrorist communication be entitled "Agents and Agency?" That would be a nice Easter Egg for Clacy fans.