Jensen Ackles teases Supernatural prequel show: “This is what REALLY happened”
By Dan Selcke
Supernatural ended in 2020 after 15 seasons. You’d think that might be long enough to give the franchise a rest for a bit, but cast member Jensen Ackles — who played Dean Winchester for all 15 of those seasons — is already working on a prequel series called The Winchesters, about Sam and Dean’s parents, John and Mary.
By the time the show starts, Mary is long dead, having being killed by a demon in the boys’ childhood. That’s what starts their father John on the path of becoming a hunter, and what inspires Sam and Dean to later go into the vocation themselves.
John’s family, like Mary’s, had ties to the monster-hunting profession beforehand, but apparently John wasn’t clued into the existence of demons and monsters and such until after his wife died. “Obviously, we’ve got a massive fix for that,” Ackles recently told TV Line. “But we get to that point, and we play the ‘Ooh, that’s why’ kind of a thing.”
"That’s kind of the exciting thing, in my opinion, is that the waypoints or the tentpoles that were established on the mothership, as we lovingly call it, those will get touched on. We’ll get to those waypoints in a way that we probably didn’t expect. And that’s what we’re really having fun with is, like, the story is coming together. It’s not the washed version. It’s not the sugar-coated version of how mom and dad met. This is what really happened."
On the mothership show, John and Mary Winchester were played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Samantha Smith respectively. On the new show, they’ll be played by Drake Rodger and Meg Donnelly. Ackles will narrate the show as Dean.
Jensen Ackles is hopeful that The Winchesters will move forward at The CW
We should note that The Winchesters actually hasn’t been picked up to series yet; they’re making a pilot now, but that’s no guarantee that The CW will bite, particularly since they’re in the process of being sold to a owner and are in a delicate place.
Still, Ackles is hopeful. He even thinks he might direct some of the episodes. “Obviously, I gotta get approved by the studio, but I think they know me, so I might have a good chance,” he laughed.
Until then, you can see Ackles as Soldier Boy in the upcoming this season of The Boys, which premieres on Amazon Prime Video on June 3.
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