Supernatural has always been a tad too niche for the generic television audience’s tastes. The series started as episodic horror and transformed into an apocalyptic thriller spanning seasons, all while centering its core on character-driven family drama. But despite Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki finding love, brotherhood, and family in each other (just like their fictional alter-egos), the legendary duo who altered the brain chemistry of an entire generation had quite a small start for a series so epic.
The story of how Warner Bros. and Eric Kripke discovered the boys who would go on to carry the show on their backs for 15 years is somewhat underwhelming. However, the ripple effect of Jensen Ackles, Jared Padalecki, and Eric Kripke crossing paths is now and forever etched in pop culture history.
Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki: The Origin
When Supernatural began to cast its net for the leading duo – Sam and Dean Winchester – both Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki came in to read for the part of the younger sibling. Eric Kripke was already familiar with Ackles via his work in CW’s Smallville where he played a minor yet memorable role. Padalecki, on the other hand, came in fresh from the success of Gilmore Girls.
In the casting room, once both actors read their lines, chaos ensued. Both Ackles and Padalecki were impressive as Sam Winchester and Kripke could not settle on one and let go of the other. But the fact that Supernatural was bound to be so timeless in retrospect was established in its conception when the Game of Thrones legend David Nutter himself sat in on the castings and directed the pilot.
In an oral history recorded by Variety, Kripke revealed how the production team behind the show solved the dual casting of Sam and launched one of the greatest television series in existence:
When we were casting, you see a lot of people. We hadn’t found our Sam and Dean. David Nutter suggested Jensen because we knew him from “Smallville.” We met with him to play Sam, and we fell in love with [him]. And then Jared came in, and he was a really great Sam too. Looking back, we were such idiots to not see it… We had two great Sams and no Dean and you think it would be obvious to put one into the other role, but it was not obvious.
He added:
So we [went] to Peter Roth and we said, “We’re not sure what to do,” and Peter was like, “Why don’t you make Jensen Dean?” We all looked at each other like, “We’re idiots, of course.” It’s so difficult to find one actor who is charismatic enough to be a breakout character and to support a show. So to find two of them, where there’s only two leads… I didn’t realize what a miracle it was at the time. It’s a miracle.
As it turned out, Jensen Ackles went on to be the right call for Dean Winchester, not simply because we have only seen him as Dean but no other actor could have owned the role and done it justice like he did.
Today, the lead duo is still devoted to the Supernatural fandom, showing up for the conventions without a hitch no matter how preoccupied they may be otherwise, thriving on stories and behind-the-scenes pranks and answering the same questions for the millionth time.
The Legacy of Supernatural Lives On in Its Actors
In the beginning, there were two brothers who lost their mother to an unnatural death and their father to grief and tragedy. In the aftermath, the family business involved hunting down monsters and sending them to Purgatory while themselves going to hell and back for each other (literally).
However, before the Winchester boys could rain down chaos upon the supernatural world, the characters of Sam and Dean still needed faces, and as witnessed by the fans over the 15-year-long journey, no one could have been better in those roles other than Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles respectively.
Always the sassier elder brother with the cool car, the rock songs, the leather jacket, and the overprotective instincts, Ackles was picture-perfect casting in terms of his 15-season-long story arc as Dean Winchester. Meanwhile, the loyal yet rebellious younger sibling with the mischievous air and an aversion to the hunters’ lifestyle couldn’t have been better portrayed by anyone other than Jared Padalecki.
What made the pair better in their respective roles was that Ackles represented Dean in a multitude of ways to the younger Padalecki who played Sam. Their fictional counterparts began to reflect upon their real identities and soon life began to imitate art when the two leads found themselves crying over each other’s on-screen deaths because one simply could not imagine a life without the other in the real world.
From finding their soul mates on set to forming a lifelong bond and getting tattooed at each other’s wedding, the Supernatural cast is unreplicable in many ways. But most importantly, it was the wild luck of Eric Kripke and Warner Bros. President Peter Roth for having stumbled across the best possible cast roster that they could have ever dreamed of. Together, Jensen Ackles, Jared Padalecki, Misha Collins, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan redefined the saying: the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
