Jared Padalecki, who co-stars with Jensen Ackles in the new WB series Supernatural, told SCI FI Wire that he was attracted to the mythology that will be explored each week on the show.
Jared Padalecki, who co-stars with Jensen Ackles in the new WB series Supernatural, told SCI FI Wire that he was attracted to the mythology that will be explored each week on the show.
"There's a lot of great literary value in the story and the mythology of it and the reluctant hero," Padalecki said in an interview at the Television Critics Association press tour in Beverly Hills, Calif. "There's just so much more that's so much deeper than just 'Now we must fight this beast or that demon.' So it was really intriguing."
Supernatural centers around two brothers, played by Padalecki (Gilmore Girls) and Ackles (Smallville), who travel around the country investigating, hunting and fighting mysterious phenomena. Their travels are driven by the search for their father, who is on a quest to find the reason behind their mother's bizarre death.
Padalecki said series creator and executive producer Eric Kripke encouraged the actors to do research into the stories that they will be exploring, but he had already come to the role with a certain knowledge of the subject matter. "My mom is actually a heroes, myths and legends teacher, so I knew a lot about archetypes and mythology and the classic stories," he said. "I had heard of the woman in white, which is what the pilot's about. I've heard of Bloody Mary and the hook man and the lady in the lake. I mean, hopefully that's stuff that we'll get to explore, but it's stuff that everybody knows."
Kripke said in a presentation on the new show that he's always wanted to do a series which explored popular myths and legends. "[It's] kind of an obsession of mine, and a show that I've really wanted to do for really the extent of my career, a show about American folklore and urban legends, and sort of the idea that every town has a really great, terrifying ghost story," he said. "And that's a show that I've wanted to do forever, and just through conversation and creative discussion with [co-producer] McG [and] with Warner Brothers, we landed on this idea to do it as a road show, that the purity of literally just driving in and out of a different horror movie every week, driving in and out of a different small town where something dark and evil is lurking in the shadows, seemed like a very pure and stripped-down and mythic way to tell this story." Supernatural airs in the fall Tuesdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.
Source: SciFi.com