A huge sample of text from Supernatural: The Official Companion, season 6, which was released yesterday, has been released on The CW blog. The except features interviews with both Jared Padalecki (Sam) and Jensen Ackles (Dean), where they discuss their characters’ journeys through the sixth season. Both interviews are very insightful and definitely worth reading!
From The CW blog: Jared Padalecki on playing soulless Sam, joking with Misha Collins (Castiel) and looking ahead to season 7:
Going into season six, before Jared Padalecki found out his character would be soulless, the actor had a hunch that something would be wrong with Sam this season. “Obviously spending some time in Hell would do something to you,” says Padalecki. “It’d make you change a little bit. Plus, Sam had Lucifer inside of him, so I don’t see how he could come out of Hell and not be very different.”
It’s that difference that Padalecki particularly enjoyed playing. “Some of my favourite scenes of the season were where we get to see Sam be just an absolute mechanical professional, a bit cold and calculating,” he says. “That was really fun, because for years Sam had been this really emotional, passionate guy. It was fun to play the opposite.” So opposite, in fact, that this Sam doesn’t think twice about killing innocent people. “I got to play it like, ‘Yeah, he seems like a nice guy, but if we can kill him and save two people, that’s one for two, as opposed to letting three people die.’ Dean is going, ‘Who are you? Where’d you come from? You don’t kill somebody, you see if you can help them!’ But Soulless Sam is like, ‘Well, doing it that way is risky.’ It was a total departure from the first 104 episodes.
“I had so much fun playing Soulless Sam!” Padalecki exclaims. “There’s a quote that I love: ‘Everybody’s the hero of their own story.’ Sam struggled with that a lot in season four with Lilith and Ruby and going, ‘Look, you’re wrong. I’m doing the right thing – I’m gonna kill Lilith! Come on, help me out.’ It’s like, ‘Why are you hating on me when I’m just going to kill the worst demon alive right now?’ So in season six, when he was soulless, he was [still doing what he thought was the right thing], he was just calculated because he was emotionless. He looked at it very logistically and realistically: ‘Well, maybe you’re a demon and I like you, but as a demon you might kill ten people, so I’d rather kill you, because you’re one person as opposed to letting you kill ten people.’ He was very mathematical. ‘One death compared to ten deaths? Okay, go with one death.’ It was really cool to play that character. I knew it was going to be for a stretch, so I tried to do the best that I could. As an actor, it’s my job to understand why he was doing what he was doing, and obviously I can never go, ‘Oh, well, I’ll get rid of my soul for a little bit… ’ You can’t really do that! So I had to try to justify how somebody who has no soul would think of these things. I didn’t want to play Sam as evil and I didn’t want to play him boring. I didn’t want no soul to mean I walked around slack-jawed and bored the audience.
“It was fun to do the comical things,” adds Padalecki. “Like the episode with the fairies. Dean’s like, ‘I’ve been abducted by aliens and you’re trying to sleep with the hippy chick?’ Sam’s like, ‘Well, I looked for you a little bit… ’ It was kind of a weird mixture.”
Despite the fun he had with it, Padalecki found playing Soulless Sam challenging at times, especially when he was working opposite Jensen Ackles. “For five years I’ve been so used to chatting with Jensen on camera,” he points out. “The reason the characters have such great chemistry is that he and I react off each other. That’s our souls reacting: this makes me think that and feel that, this makes me say that, which makes you feel that, which makes you say this, which makes me feel this… So it’s weird to try to not go off feelings. Somebody will say something that will elicit a reaction out of you as a person and you want to be thoughtful, and then you realize, ‘Oh, I don’t have any thoughtfulness.’ Many many times I’d ask for another take – ‘I feel I was too empathetic on that take,’ which is kind of funny. But Sam’s normally full of heart, always listening, and he cares and he wants to help. When Castiel’s doing something wrong, like sticking his hand in that boy’s chest, usually Sam’s the one who wants to run in and say, ‘Hey, hey, hey! Stop!’ Instead Dean’s doing it and Sam’s watching very robotically. It was very tough, and a few times I had to catch myself. So when I got my soul back it was like going back home. It’s like, ‘Alright, that was a lot of fun, like an awesome vacation, but it’s good to get back home and back down to brass tacks.”
Article Continues BelowSpeaking of eliciting emotional reactions, Padalecki knows how to get a laugh – or maybe a cry – out of Misha Collins with their long-running prank war. “Misha forgot his iPhone at craft service and I happened to find it. I knew it was his, because he’d been showing it to me the day before, so I thought, ‘Oh, Misha, you’re going to pay for this!’” Padalecki recalls. “I grabbed it and I frantically was like, ‘What can I do? How can I play a prank on Misha? I know – send a bunch of text messages!’ Misha has an iPhone plan where text messages cost fifty cents per text, so I texted myself. I typed one letter at a time and wrote stuff like, ‘I should be more careful with my belongings and I shouldn’t leave them at the craft service tent’ – ‘I,’ send, ‘S,’ send, ‘H,’ send, one letter at a time. I ended up sending a hundred texts or something, so it cost about fifty bucks. Meanwhile, Misha was frantically looking around for his phone thinking he’d lost it. Finally I said, ‘Misha, I got good news, your phone’s not lost. I’m a hundred percent certain that your phone is within one hundred feet of where you’re standing.’ He started looking around. I’d left it on the windshield of one of our trucks in the circus, so he found it. Then I told him, ‘You might notice on your bill that you have some text charges. You’ve been texting too much this month.’ I realized later that I’m such an idiot, because it costs fifty cents to send the texts, but it costs twenty-five cents to receive one. I’d sent all these texts, like, ‘Hee, hee, hee, I’m so smart,’ but I was being charged half of what he was being charged. I should’ve just texted somebody else. So I got a laugh, but Misha got a laugh, too, because it came back to [bite] me.”
Like Collins with Padalecki, Castiel got the last laugh on Sam, when Sam’s attempt to gank the nuclear soul-charged angel with an angel-killing blade didn’t get the desired result, because Castiel is no longer an angel. This move by Sam was at least partially fueled by vengeance, since Castiel callously removed the mental wall that held back Sam’s tortuous memories of Hell, as well as the memories of the unsavory methods his soulless self had used when hunting without Dean. So the big question for Sam moving forward is, how will he handle these horrific memories? Your guess is as good as Padalecki’s, but he does make a prediction: “Season seven is gonna be a doozy.”
Jensen Ackles’ thoughts on season 6, directing ‘Weekend at Bobby’s,’ Dean’s relationship with Sam and playing a vampire:
“More than any other season premiere, episode one of season six was probably the most anticipated script for me, to see where they go after the Apocalypse. I like the idea of going forward from the Apocalypse and trying to pick up the pieces,” Jensen Ackles says. “I had the idea of doing a Jason Bourne type of scenario, where they wake up a year or two later and they don’t know what happened, but they know something big happened, and it’s like piecing together how bad it was and what damage was done, and where the characters are that they’d been dealing with.” Ackles’ idea wasn’t that far off, so what did he think when he finally did read that first script of the season? “Well, because I was directing the fourth episode, they sent me that script first, and it went back to the monster-of-the-week kind of story that we did in seasons one and two, which was cool. It was nice to get back to the basics, back to what the show was originally all about.”
One of the basic things the show was originally about was one brother pulling the other brother back into the life of hunting monsters, which is what happened again in the first few episodes of season six, only instead of Dean pulling Sam away from college life, Sam was pulling Dean away from life in the suburbs. “The domestication of Dean, as I like to call it,” comments Ackles, “was an interesting side of him to have to play, because you’ve taken this character out of the element he knows so well and put him into a situation that for everybody else is very normal, but for him it’s completely out of the norm, and he doesn’t really know how to act. But it was nice getting back into hunter Dean.”
A less drastic change was the actor going from in front of the camera to behind the camera, when he directed ‘Weekend at Bobby’s’. That came about, Ackles believes, due to the interest he had shown in directing while working on the show. “If one of the directors asked me what I would like to do, I’d always suggest something related to positioning, camera angles, and movements to have intensity on the scenes. So I guess [the producers] wanted to reward my work. They said, ‘Hey man, you really put a lot into this show, you’ve given it your blood, sweat, and tears. We wanna give you a pat on the back and let you direct an episode next season. You deserve it.’ It meant a lot to me. You can’t imagine how excited I was!
“It was really cool,” he enthuses. “It was the fourth episode aired, but we actually filmed it first, which was a nice thing that the producers did – they moved my script up to be shot first so that I’d have time to prep. Otherwise, if we were shooting in sequential order, I would be filming on episode three and not really be able to prep. It was a really good experience, but it was a lot of work. I kinda went into it with the mentality of, ‘If I fail at this it won’t be because I wasn’t prepared,’ so I pored over that script for weeks and I showed up day one with eight days of shot lists. I was ready to go and swing at the fences. I had a lot of support; I had a very talented crew who watched my back and made sure that I wasn’t doing anything stupid. I couldn’t have asked for more support than I got from everybody. It was a good episode, too. It was all about Bobby, so Jim Beaver was carrying the weight of the episode. Jim’s such a trouper. It was the biggest Supernatural episode he’s had. I think it turned out alright.”
Conversely, it is probably the smallest episode that Dean and Sam have had. But nevertheless, it contains a key moment for them – it was obvious when Sam stopped Dean from burning Crowley’s bones that something was off about him. It’s not until the seventh episode, ‘Family Matters’, that it is revealed that Sam doesn’t have a soul and, as Ackles puts it, “There’s something seriously wrong with him, so there’s a division of the brothers again.” Sam is soulless for the first half of the season, a scenario that Ackles found challenging, because Jared Padalecki wasn’t playing the character Ackles had grown used to acting with. “I didn’t expect it to be that difficult, but it was,” says Ackles. “When actors play the same characters together for so long, there’s a chemistry, an ebb and flow between those people, so when that is cut off, it really throws you off. I had trouble adjusting to that, so I was very happy when Sam got his soul back.”
Of course, Sam’s soul wasn’t intact – he had a wall in his mind blocking out the literal Hell he’d been through – but that was arguably a benefit to Ackles, since he got to go back to playing the over-protective big brother. “Yeah, I think there was a sense of reverting back to the way things used to be. We see how much Dean is wary of that fragile wall that Death put up and how he is very protective of Sam and not wanting him to fall victim to those memories. I was very relieved, because it gives Dean his characteristics back. When he didn’t have his younger brother, when Sam was so different, it really affected Dean’s characteristics; he couldn’t be the wild and crazy shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of guy, because he was so concerned that Sam was gonna kick in the door and shoot everybody. ‘That’s not his role, that’s my role. That’s what I do.’ So it really changed the dynamic in the relationship between the brothers for a while and it was not something that I was used to doing. Of course, Jared was doing a really good job of doing soulless Sam, but I think he was ready to get back to original Sam, too. As actors it was nice to get back to the original relationship.”
On the other hand, Ackles enjoyed the opportunity in season six to play a monster himself. “It’s always fun to spice it up a bit,” he says. “You get infected and all of a sudden you’re a vampire! You can hear people’s hearts beating and stuff. It was really fun to play.” Even more fun, though, was playing a cowboy, which was a dream come true for the Texan. “For me, waking up in the morning when I was about six years old, strapping on my six-shooters and my leather sheriff’s vest, and then hopping off to breakfast was just what I grew up doing. In fact, I sent a photo to my father of me in the full cowboy get-up. We went authentic – the wardrobe was incredible. Diane Widas, head of our wardrobe department, put together this duster jacket she designed that was real oilskin. It was a very, very cool outfit, and on the picture I sent to my father I just put, ‘Supernatural: The Western’. He was like, ‘You’ve been rehearsing for that scene since you were six!’ That was pretty cool.”
With Dean playing the protective older brother again and getting to go to the wild west, Ackles was in his comfort zone, but then suddenly he had to work opposite Misha Collins’ rapidly changing Castiel. “The stakes are raised, the emotions are high,” says Ackles of the last few Castiel-infused episodes of the season.
Looking ahead to dealing with Sam and Dean’s new god-like foe in season seven, he simply says, “We’ll see what happens.”
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