Interview with Jensen Ackles From SUPERNATURAL

May 2011, Singapore – Just in time for the premiere of Season Six of SUPERNATURAL, here’s a treat for SUPERADRIANME.com readers.  Here’s an interview with Jensen Ackles who plays Dean Winchester, the rugged bad boy who teams up with his younger brother Sam (Jared Padalecki) to battle evil supernatural forces on “Supernatural.”

Ackles was most recently seen in the feature film “My Bloody Valentine 3D,” Patrick Lussier’s remake of the 1981 slasher film. Ackles played Tom, a principled man who returns to his home in Harmony, Missouri, 10 years after 22 people were murdered on Valentine’s night. Ackles also starred in David Winkler’s “Devour” for Sony Pictures and David Mackay’s romantic comedy “Ten Inch Hero,” a sexy, funny, romantic comedy about the tangled love lives of co-workers at a sub shop in Santa Cruz.

His previous television roles include playing Jason Teague on “Smallville,” Alec/X5-494 on “Dark Angel” and C.J. on “Dawson’s Creek.” Additionally, he starred in the miniseries “Blonde,” opposite Patrick Dempsey and Poppy Montgomery.

He began his acting career in 1997 as the critically acclaimed Eric Roman Brady on “Days of our Lives,” for which he received three Daytime Emmy nominations and won the Soap Opera Digest Award for Best Male Newcomer in 1998.

He was born in Dallas and was raised in Richardson, Texas. He currently resides in Los Angeles.

So how long is the white picket fence life going to last for Dean?
JA: Well, for the SUPERNATURAL fans, probably not very long, so they can rest assured. But it’s definitely a unique colour for him, you know? Driving a pickup truck to the construction site and having dinner and falling asleep in a normal bed. I think there was always a piece of Dean that wanted to make an effort to live a normal life, and Lisa was the closest thing that he had to that. I think that’s really what he was hung up on, was the idea of what she could bring him. And, you know, she’s not unattractive! But it actually gets into it about episode one, which is the reveal of what Dean has been up to. But it’s also the reveal of his pull back into the life, the hunter life. So it will last probably a few episodes of him really trying to fight the urge of getting back into that life, because now he’s got another life. And it’s interesting for a character with that kind of past to be domesticated the way he has been, it’s this odd balance of normalcy with complete and utter oddity. He’s got the white picket fence but at the same time he still has a shotgun underneath the bed, the silver amulets above the door and the Devil’s trap underneath the rug. So it’s cool. Once Sam gets revealed back into Dean’s world, then it will be a slow draw back in. It’s like the Mob: you can never get out.

What can you tell us about Dean’s state of mind this season?
JA: Well, from what I know so far, it’s a reluctancy. There’s definitely an inner battle between wanting to stay out of the game and wanting to live a life, wanting to be there for this woman and child that he has now become a family to, but there’s also that undeniable urge of being a hunter – it’s in his blood, it’s what he does, it’s what he has known. So there’s that battle of wanting to protect his family and keep them as far away from it as possible but in doing that, he’s getting deeper and deeper back into it. It’s that inner struggle.

Can you give us a tease as to what’s in store for both of them, what they will be dealing with?
JA: Well, we’re getting back to a sort of a season 1 formula, in the sense that we are hitting “reset” on the whole show. I’m anticipating this whole season more than any other simply for the fact that we set out to tell a five-year story and we told it. So I’m like, “Now what are we going to do?” Luckily we have very intelligent and creative people writing the show, and I know they have got a lot of ideas up their sleeves. I’m just excited about seeing what’s coming down the pipe. But we’re getting back to that formula from season 1 where it’s a monster-of-the-week type of deal, there will be a mythology common denominator throughout the episodes which is like what we saw in seasons 1 and 2, but what that is, is not completely laid out yet.

What monsters are we going to see?
JA: We’re getting back to some of the old ones: I know we’ve got a Djinn, which was in the episode “What Is And What Should Never Be” at the end of season 2 – (Eric) Kripke actually directed that one – so we have a revisit from those characters. Since the end of season 5, the world of the evil, the monsters and the demons has had a bit of an upturn. There are monsters turning up in areas that we shouldn’t be fighting them in, and they’re acting out of character, like vampires that are walking around in the day, everything’s turned upside down. So for the first few episodes it’s a lot of trying to make sense of what is going on.

So, you’re directing episode 4 right?
JA: Yeah, I’ve already directed it. We shot it first so that I could have time to prep without working. If we’d shot it in order, I’d actually be acting on episode 3 whilst trying to prep for episode 4 and it would have been a lot more difficult than had it been done the way that we did it. So they moved it up in the shooting schedule so that I could prep beforehand. We’ve already shot that, we’ve shot the season opener, and now we’re onto episode 2 – as far as the airing goes.

What was the directing experience like?
JA: It was cool. Looking at scripts for the past five or six years, I have looked at it in a certain way: I have looked at it as an actor, and looked at it for my character, and trying to creatively come up with ways to do scenes as an actor. So to look at it as a director, is all-encompassing: you have to look at the entire script as a whole, you have to look at every scene, every character, every stage direction. So it was actually quite refreshing to have a completely different outlook on the way I was reading the script. It is a lot of work. A lot more work than I am used to doing. There’s a lot of questions, as far as you are fielding a dozen questions a minute: people are constantly coming up to you and asking you, “Do you want the red one or the black one? Do you want the big one or the small one? Do you like this gun or this gun? Do you want this truck?” But I got a lot of advice from guys that I really respect, especially as part of the show, like Bob Singer, Phil Sgreccia, Kim Manners – who told me season 2, he was like, “You’re going to direct one of these days, I can see it. And when you do, I’ll be right there.” And I felt like he was. So that was kind of cool. But it’s a totally different ballgame. It was nice and it was fun to be captain of the creative problem-solving squad, because that’s essentially what you are. Every time there is an issue, like, “Oh well, we just lost that location,” it’s like, “Okay, back to the drawing-board. What are we going to do?” So just having that responsibility was refreshing, it was kind of nice. If you had asked me the day after I stopped if I was going to do it again, I would have probably said, “Not a chance in Hell,” but now it’s settled down, yeah I would definitely do it again.

What about post-production stuff?
JA: I have just got the editor’s cut and now I am giving notes. We have a conference call with them tomorrow, and I’ll give them my director’s notes, and then because it’s episode 4, it’s not going to air until October I think, so I
have time. I will probably go down one weekend next month and sit in the bay and do some editing, which I am looking forward to, because I’ve never been a part of post. I’ve never been a part of prep either, which was a totally new experience for me. I basically just show up on the day that we film and I do my thing, so to be there at the beginning, the middle and now the end is unique.
Okay, what’s your favourite thing about Sam?
JA: My favourite thing?
Or your least favourite?
My least favourite is how tall he is. My favourite thing? I like the balance of the two characters, just as far as them playing off each other. People can say it’s chemistry or whatever as actors, but I really think it is the characters that are such a good blend, because Dean’s the gruff, tough guy who is also a smart arse and stuff, whereas Sam is more the straight and narrow, with his head in the game. So I think that balance is what makes it work.

Are we going to have more of the relationship between Dean and Castiel?
JA: I hope so. Misha (Collins) hasn’t been in the first three episodes, so we’re still waiting for Castiel to show back up, but he does in the third episode I believe. So I haven’t read anything about what the relationship is going to be like, but now that he’s the big cheese of Heaven, I’m not sure how that is going to alter his character. And now that Dean’s a bit different, I don’t know, but I’m interested to see.

Supernatural Season 6 premieres 17 May 2011, every Tuesday at 9.50pm first & exclusively on AXN BEYOND (StarHub TV ch 525)

Photo credits: AXN BEYOND

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