“I didn’t take it seriously,” the Reacher star remembers thinking. “I was like, ‘They’ll throw me the part if I look like the guy.”

BY THE TIME Marvel Studios’s first Thor film was being cast, Alan Ritchson had already appeared on American Idol, played a superhero (briefly) in Smallville, and nabbed a comedic breakout role in Spike TV’s Blue Mountain State.

He figured, at this point, that since he looked the part of Thor—the blonde, ripped, hammer-wielding superhero based on the Norse god of the same name—he would have the part in the bag. That did not turn out to be the case.

“I didn’t take it seriously,” he told Men’s Health writer Lauren Larson in our latest cover story. She remarked on the rueful tone in his voice. “I was like, They’ll throw me the part if I look like the guy; nobody really cares about acting.”

It turns out they do, in fact, care about acting. Ritchson’s team was told after his audition that while he indeed came into the process as the frontrunner, he hadn’t shown “the craft.” Chris Hemsworth landed the role instead.

Ritchson was torn apart by the disappointment, studying the Thor scenes for three weeks after the audition. Afterwards, he made his way into an exclusive acting class taught by Deborah Aquila, who was the casting director for The Shawshank Redemption and eventually became the executive vice president of casting at Paramount Television Studios and CBS Studios.

“He had done Blue Mountain State, and I watched episodes of it,” she said in the cover story. “And I was scratching my head going, How am I going to help this man?”

Eventually, Ritchson’s enthusiasm, eagerness, and hard work helped him secure a spot in the class, and learn a ton from Aquila once he was in it.

“I remember that face,” Aquila continued. “He kept looking at me, like saying, Yeah? We’re good? With those twinkly eyes,”

He emerged with a solid understanding of “the craft,” and while he still had some disappointments—missing out on Sam Claflin’s role in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire—he managed to consistently book smaller roles in hit shows like Black Mirror, New Girl, and Brooklyn Nine-Nine that helped pave the way to his eventual breakthrough success in Reacher.

The first Thor movie starts with the titular character as a cocky god who believes he’s entitled to rule the greatness of Asgard, only to be banished to Earth where he would eventually learn humility, and, in turn, his true value and worthiness. Ritchson may not have landed that role he so coveted, but along the way, he managed to learn a similar lesson—on the road to his own well-earned feeling of worthiness.