After four successful seasons on Prime Video, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War marks the franchise’s leap from streaming series to full-scale feature-length thriller. Directed by Andrew Bernstein, the film finds Jack Ryan (John Krasinski) reluctantly pulled back into the world of espionage when a covert international mission spirals into a deadly conspiracy involving a rogue black-ops unit. Reuniting with trusted allies Mike November (Michael Kelly) and James Greer (Wendell Pierce), and joined by the razor-sharp MI6 officer Emma Marlowe (Sienna Miller), Ryan faces his most personal and dangerous mission yet.
For Bernstein, however, the challenge wasn’t simply making a bigger version of the show. It was making sure Ghost War truly felt like a movie. Drawing inspiration from gritty 1970s spy thrillers, Bernstein approached the project with a heightened sense of scale, emotion, and visual intensity, determined to avoid the “extended episode” trap that often plagues television-to-film adaptations. In conversation with our Peter Gray ahead of the film’s release, the director discusses reshaping the franchise for the big screen, grounding the action in visceral realism, pushing returning characters into darker emotional territory, and why Sienna Miller’s Emma Marlowe may be the franchise’s secret weapon moving forward.
One of the things that I really liked about this film is that a lot of series-to-film adaptations struggle to shake that “extended episode” feeling. What was the first conscious decision that you made as a director to make this feel cinematic rather than episodic?
It’s a great question, and it was the central question of the whole pre-production of this movie to do exactly what you said, to not make it feel like it was an extension of the series. We wanted to honour what we did, but make it feel like its own standalone movie. Part of that was in the storytelling. We wanted the storytelling to feel fresh and the stakes to be higher, because we didn’t have a ton of time to tell it, so all the stakes had to be higher. That was in the characters, the emotion, and then the action was elevated a little bit higher than what we had done before. We made it more intense, and then visually we shot the movie in a different way than we had done the series. It felt like its own unique thing. We even wanted the music to sound different. We really felt like all the elements that were involved in this movie honoured what came before, but certainly not duplicated. There’s the feeling of, “Oh, I’m with old friends, but it feels very different.”
Going off all those elements, is there a choice in this film that you made that you’re most proud of that audiences won’t consciously notice?
Yeah, I think the way we shot the movie. We went back to the classic 70s sort of spy movies. That was a lot of our touchstones for this movie, in terms of the lenses we used and how we shot the movie. We wanted to really ground the audience with the characters in ever situation. Whether it was a big action sequence or an emotional sequence, and really get into their skin. That was something the series didn’t do as much. Although we love what was done (in the series), we wanted to bring a more visceral energy into the sequences. Hopefully it does that and makes the movie sort of come alive a little bit more.
You’re stepping into a world where John Krasinski, Wendell Pierce and Michael Kelly have lived these characters for years. How did it feel to guide them, or curate them, in a way that you hadn’t already done?
I think it was pushing the boundaries of what we had seen in these characters. I think it was pushing every character to a new place and to dig deeper in terms of what it means to be in the job they’re in. We spend a lot of time talking to the real people who do these jobs, and the emotional depth and the morality issues they have to deal with are super complicated. We wanted to bring that into this movie. We wanted all of the actors to delve deeper than they had before, so the stakes felt much higher. Luckily, we have great actors who want to do that digging. I think the stakes all across the movie feel higher and heightened and more intense. Right from the beginning, you’re like, “Alright, let’s go, not just action-wise, but story and character wise (too).”
And talking about great actors and bringing new things, we have Sienna Miller brought into the fold. It’s so great that we have a character like hers who is an equal to Jack Ryan. She brings this needed femininity. Where did the conversation start about bringing that character into the fold and asking Sienna to come in and have fun?
Yeah, one of the reasons for making this movie, as you said, was to make it feel different than the series. This was something we had never done before. I think the franchise has never had someone who’s an equal with Jack Ryan. And to have this badass female MI6 agent who has gone through a lot of the same stuff as Jack, but also has a very different way of looking at the world. It was super exciting for us, and I knew it would distinguish us from the series in a really interesting way. And then to find somebody who was a badass with all the action, all of us (said) Sienna Miller.
For one, she’s an amazing actress. She’s an incredible person. She’s a proud member of the Jack Ryan family now. I think one of the exciting things about this movie is people are going to see she’s an action star. She’s amazing. That’s the excitement for all of us when we were making the movie was watching Sienna do this. People are going to be blown away. It was one of the real thrills of the movie, to have this secret nobody knew about that we were going to expose in this movie. Sienna kicked ass! She was incredible.
Well, if we ever need to continue this Jack Ryan universe, I feel like a (Sienna Miller) movie is definitely the way to go…
By the way, me too. Trust me. And Sienna feels the same way you do. She was like, at the beginning (of filming), “Am I going to be good at this?” And at the end, she was like, “Give me something to do!” It was great.
Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Shadow War is streaming on Prime Video from May 20th, 2026.
