‘Supernatural’ Jensen Ackles, Jared Padalecki Once Traded Lines
After Supernatural, Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles will always be Sam and Dean Winchester to fans. The show ran for 15 seasons and there’s already a prequel about their parents in development. The actors knew their characters so well that they knew when something in the script wouldn’t sound right coming out of their mouths.
Ackles was a guest on Michael Rosenbaum’s podcast Inside of You on the episode that aired Jan. 18, though was recorded in October 2021. He told a Supernatural story about one time he and Padalecki just swapped Sam and Dean Winchester lines, and it worked.
Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki always got input into Sam and Dean Winchester
Ackles said that the longer Supernatural went on, the more the writers trusted the actors with insights about their character. He recalled one scene that didn’t sit well with himself or his co-star.
“We got this one scene,” Ackles said on Inside of You. “It was where the brothers have a blow up and they part ways for a bit. They break up. The brothers break up. Reading it, he and I were both bumping on it. Something’s wrong. It’s not working. I was like, ‘Well, it’s reading like a couple breaking up. It’s reading like a rom-com couple breaking up. This should be Hanks and Meg Ryan. This is not Sam and Dean Winchester.’”
Jared Padalecki had the idea to swap lines
Padalecki has been known to get emotional about Supernatural. Ackles credited his co-star with coming up with the idea that fixed the scene. Simply by reading each other’s lines, the Supernatural scene played better.
“Jared had this fricking brilliant idea,” Ackles continued. “He goes, ‘Do me a favor. You read all of Sam’s lines. I’m going to read all of Dean’s lines.’ I was like okay. And we did it and that was it. We flipped and that was the scene. I read his lines as Dean and he read Dean’s lines as Sam.”
The ‘Supernatural’ episode director didn’t even notice the difference
After figuring out the scene, Ackles and Padalecki brought it to Robert Singer, who was directing that episode of Supernatural. He didn’t even realize what they’d done at first.
“We went to our director who happened to be our producer and said, ‘We’ve got a pitch for you,’” Ackles said. “We’re like, ‘Hey Bob, we got an idea about the scene we’re about to shoot.’ Bob is one of my favorite people on the planet. He’s just old Brooklyn New Yorker like that, what? What? What do you guys want? ‘We want to read you the scene.’ We didn’t tell him what we were doing. So we just read it where I read the other part. We did all the dialogue so he’s like, ‘Yeah, sounds great, what’s the problem?” ‘Well, Bob, we just flipped the lines.’ He’s like, ‘Oh. Do that then.’ That was it. That’s how we did it. It worked fantastic.”
