Actor John Krasinski’s Jack Ryan speech on Venezuela from 2019 goes viral, hailed as ‘prophetic’

A clip from Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan (2018 to 2023), which shows the titular Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst played by American actor John Krasinski giving a lecture on the geopolitical landscape of Venezuela, has gone viral.

The scene from the first episode of the espionage spy thriller series’ second season, which aired in 2019, depicted Jack telling a room of CIA personnel that a faltering Venezuela may be more of a security risk to the United States than Russia, China or North Korea.

“What would you assume is the most major threat to the world stage?” asked Jack. He went on to claim that “Venezuela is arguably the single greatest resource of oil and minerals on the planet”.

A reel titled Venezuela Explained, featuring a short clip of the scene, broke the internet, accumulating more than 40 million views since it was shared on Instagram by @Saltwater_Survival on Jan 4. The reel has been copied and shared widely across other social media accounts.

Netizens have called the scene “prophetic” amid the recent 

US capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro due to his alleged drug-related crimes

. The scene was also praised for explaining the current Venezuela situation well.

Even Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan’s co-creator Carlton Cuse found it uncanny, telling US film publication Deadline on Jan 4 that “the goal of that season wasn’t prophecy – it was plausibility”.

“When you ground a story in real geopolitical dynamics, reality has a way of making it rhyme,” the 66-year-old American screenwriter said.

Cuse explained that the choice of Venezuela as the subject of the second season was conceived more than seven years ago.

“We were telling a fictional character-driven thriller rooted in Venezuela’s longstanding strategic relevance,” he said, referencing Graham Roland, his co-creator on the show, adding that their job was to “make the situation feel credible”.

The last episode of Season 2 saw Jack breaking into the palace of fictional Venezuelan President Nicolas Reyes (played by Spanish actor Jordi Molla) and holding him at gunpoint. While the series showed the corrupt leader losing his power to the opposition,

Maduro’s takedown involved a massive US military operation

.

“The season came from our desire to tell a fictional story about the forces at play, not from imagining an outcome,” Cuse added.

Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, which ran for four seasons on Prime Video, is based on the late American author’s best-selling novels about the eponymous heroic spy.

Clancy wrote 14 titles featuring Jack, the first being The Hunt For Red October in 1984, which was adapted into the 1990 film starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin.