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Highlights from the "Supernatural" press room:
Jim Beaver on what's in store for Bobby this season: "He's as handsome as ever, which ain't sayin' much. Well, I can't say a whole lot but there's a big surprise coming in the first couple episodes. It's gonna be a pretty radical experience involving Bobby. So I can't really elaborate but, put it this way, I was shocked. [Laughs.]"
Jim Beaver on the low survival rate for "Supernatural" supporting players: "Any time I make to the end of the episode I'm in, on any show, I feel pretty excited... You know, some people weren't happy with John dying but I was. [Laughs.] Because it gave me, it was the jump my career needed. [Laughs.]"
Jim Beaver on the difference between Bobby's relationship with Sam and with Dean: "Sam's taller. [Laughs.] So there's more of this [looks up], craning my neck. Seriously it seems to me - and this is just based on the episodes we've done, it's not some big evaluation - it seems to me that Bobby's got a little more feeling of investment in Dean, that maybe Dean needs something that Bobby can provide a little more than Sam. Because so far in everything we've shot, there's been a lot more of Bobby relating to Dean and trying to help Dean move forward in life than there has been with Sam. On the other hand a lot of what we've shot has been Sam kind of being separate, especially the last season or two. I don't know that there would be that big a difference if it weren't for the plotlines that were leading Sam into this kind of separateness."
Jim Beaver on if he'll ever pen and episode, considering his previous experience as a TV writer: "This year, within the last few months, was the first time I was ever tempted to call Eric [Kripke] up and say, 'Hey, I have an idea for story.' But the fact is, for one thing to me the difference between writing and acting is that writing is work. [Laughs.] And I'm just sort of generally opposed to work. It's really hard. And I love having written, but I'm not crazy about writing. So I haven't really pushed that. Also it's probably a bad season to be coming in with, 'Hey, I've got an idea for an independent story,' because hey gang, the world's coming to an end. [Laughs.]"
Sera Gamble on where they're at from a writing standpoint this season: "This season is arced out. At this point, we would be in so much trouble if we didn't know what we were doing because I'm writing episode seven so we would be running out of story by now. We know what to do if this is the end of the series and we also have ideas for what to do if it's not the end of the series. So everyone can relax, we're not asleep at the wheel I promise."
Sera Gamble on the new season: "It's a bit bonkers. I will say that the apocalypse has not turned out to be... not as dark as I thought it would be. Last season was pretty much suicidal at points. I mean especially Sam went so dark. I'm finding this apocalypse surprisingly amusing. We're having so much fun with it."
Sera Gamble on the addition of Lucifer this season: "We were careful not to just go with a typical take on Lucifer. Our Lucifer is played by Mark Pellegrino, many people know him from 'Lost.' He's beautiful and gentile and he has a very, very good fucking point to make. [Laughs.] As I think with the best of our supposed villains on the show, he is maybe almost as right or righter than the good guys. We went out of our way to make, we thought our angels were going to be dicks. We have a spectrum of angels, some of them are good and some of them seem to be bad and have ulterior motives and Lucifer is somewhere on that spectrum but you would expect maybe for him to pop up and be all the way on the evil end of the spectrum. And that's not necessarily so, he has a very complex and interesting point of view. So he's been really fascinating to kind of unlock and figure out and understand."
Sera Gamble on other newcomers for season five: "We're telling stories about the horsemen of the apocalypse. We are actually shooting an episode right now about one of the horsemen who pops up very early on. We went A-list, like right away. So they are a completely other species than species that we've done so far so we had to ask ourselves: what are they? Are they demons? Are they angels? Are they something else? And what do they do and how do they feel? And what does the apocalypse mean to them? So they have been really fun. So if angels are dicks, archangels are like super dicks. They are very different than angels and we are starting to explore that. The only representation of an archangel that we've seen so far is this sort of ominous rumbling that happened when Chuck was threatened. So we're going to follow up on that in a very extreme way. You're going to find out what happened next and you're going to meet the angel behind the rumble. He's not a nice guy."
Sera Gamble on what she's writing this season: "I wrote the second episode and it brings back several hunters that you will, that you have seen before including Rufus and Ellen."
Eric Kripke on the new season: "It's the apocalypse. It's not, we're not pulling our punches. We're not saying, we're not promising the apocalypse and saying, oh wait, we're going to hedge our bet when you come back after the cliffhang... It's the full on, end of days, out of the Book of Revelation apocalypse. Due to budgetary reasons, much of it happens off camera. We've been referring to it as the Wal-Mart Apocalypse. But there's horsemen, there's the devil and there's God and comets named Wormwood and like the whole deal. And our heroes have to basically, their goal for this season is to pull the plug on the apocalypse which the angels want to move onto paradise. The demons want it to, everyone wants to just bring on the prize fight. A lot of the things we introduced in the season finale and that really set the stage for what we're playing out here in season five."
Eric Kripke on if God will show up this year: "We are going to meet God this year. Not anytime soon and not in the first run, but God is a character which has lead to hilarious and heady times in the writers' room in 'Supernatural.' [Laughs.] Trying to break God's motivation: what does God want in this scene?"
Eric Kripke on the other characters returning: "Ellen and Jo come back. They're a hunter duo now. And Jo just insisted on hunting and Ellen said alright, well, if you're hunting, you're hunting with me. And they're back, they're back in episode two... Meg is back, not in the meat suit of Nicki Aycox, although I would have loved to have had it in the meat suit of Nicki Aycox. And I was dying for it, we literally spent like half a day trying to figure out the logic of how that could happen and we couldn't so but she's in the body of a beautiful actress, really talented actress, Rachel Miner. We're trying to bring back as many people as we can. Chuck's back, Zachariah's back, you know, I love this kind of recurring cast of players."
Eric Kripke on where the original "end in five years" plan came from: "Because I have low self-esteem, I never dreamt the show would go five years and so I had a five-year plan and now here I am at the fifth season and it's doing well. And I'm like the girl with glasses in the teen comedy and everyone wants to go into a sixth season. And I was little bewildered by it. And I think that's why earlier I was so adamant about saying five seasons because I never thought we'd go this distance. So the reality is I do have a five-year plan, we are going to finish this story, this year. We're not going to drag it out, we're not going to try to stretch it to try to accommodate and dilute it and weaken it. We're going to tell the story with a bang and it's going to end. But we're leaving the possibility for a new story to begin. So this chapter might be over but there's absolutely nothing saying a new chapter can't begin."
Eric Kripke on the tone of the fifth season: "In my mind this is also one of the most optimistic seasons of 'Supernatural' we've done because we spent so much time tearing the brothers apart and now we feel we owe it to the audience to bring them back together. It's going to be slow, it's going to be painful. They need to come back together sort of older, sadder, wiser but ultimately stronger. They need to learn to break their old patterns, they need to learn how to forgive each other. Sam's story, we really referred to it and used it a lot of times [as] the metaphor for he's an ex-addict trying to reintegrate into his family and when you're in that real life situation it's brutal because you're met with temptation daily.
I mean he's basically an ex-heroin addict surrounding by walking, talking heroin all day. And he's trying to resist and then he doesn't have the support of his family because they're hurt and they're angry and they don't trust him and that becomes a real bittersweet and ultimately heroic journey that still stay strong no matter what, keep overcoming that. [And] Dean isn't entirely, you know, not without blame here. And he has to learn how to also break the old patterns himself and not treat Sam like a freak and not treat Sam like a little brother. And they have to learn how to almost rebuild, we've torn down their relationship and now we're going to rebuild it."
Eric Kripke on if he'll write the finale: "I'm sure I will. I'm too much of a selfish bastard not to."
Eric Kripke on if we'll see John Winchester again: "You know I would love it, it's all scheduling with the major movie star that is Jeffrey Dean Morgan. I mean between 'Watchmen' and it seems like every day I read about some new movie that he's starring in so the scheduling on that would be challenging. That having been said, if he's up for it, and wants to do it, I would love to have him back. It seems like the one character who in this big storyline you would love to see back and see what his spirit has been up to."
Ben Edlund on if they'll be offering up any new paradigm twisting episodes this season: "There are some cool ones. I envy Carver, Jeremy Carver, for an episode he gets to write soon which I won't get into too much. But I think he's writing it, I don't know, I don't show up to the office too much but it gets really in the meta world of TV, in the same way that there's a very meta aspect to like 'Monster Movie,' for example, and 'Ghostfacers.' This is more about just being trapped in TV, which many people have done, we do that well though. What it's called? We steal very well. And this is going to be a good theft of that kind of break all the walls of television reality, pass them through a bunch of genres. That's going to be cool."
Ben Edlund on if this should be the last season: "It's a novel. This is a thing that started with a deceptively simple premise of a muscle car and two beautiful men... who shoot ghosts, where the fuck did that come from? [Laughs.] They drive around a shoot ghosts, oooh classic rock! And I like this show, I like it, I love it. And it's gone from that beginning which was this beautiful, like okay, let's go to the Saturday matinee creature feature movie, and it's gone from that to family, to demons, to demonic family, to an increasing map of, a cosmology... we have an arc, I think it's about a five-year arc. If we need to go to six years we're going to have to actually use the Koran or something. [Laughs.] It's going to have to be, we're going to have to figure that out. We have to go to a Mormon planet and it's going to have to be weird, really weird."
Misha Collins on his series regular status: "Well if I'm not going to play a larger role, they've wasted a bunch of money. [Laughs.]"
Misha Collins on the changes in season five: "I think last season felt like, oh, we have allies, the angels were our allies, at least we have that to fall back on. Now we don't have that anymore. It's just a handful of people fighting all of the most powerful beings in the universe."
Misha Collins on his spotlight episode from last season: "That was cool, it was fun playing two different characters in one episode... I sort of got to see how hard it is to be Sam and Dean, it was a lot of work. [Laughs.] And I got really sick at the end of the episode, I was like I'm not cut out for this. I'm more of a one or two scene character."
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