Many of us get our breaking entertainment news from Twitter — but if the news is about a show you personally starred in for 15 series, you’d sure hope this wouldn’t be the case.
Yet that’s exactly what happened to Jared Padalecki, best known as Sam Winchester to the many fans who avidly followed his character through over 350 episodes of Supernatural. The show also starred Jensen Ackles, who played Padalecki’s brother.
On Thursday, Deadline reported that a prequel series concerning the parents of the Winchester brothers, titled The Winchesters, is in development at the CW. Ackles’s character will be involved as a series narrator, and he is an executive producer. Ackles’s wife, Danneel, who had a recurring Supernatural role, is also an executive producer.
But when Ackles, who was second-billed on Supernatural, shared Deadline’s story on Twitter, Padalecki’s reaction was unfiltered.
“Dude. Happy for you. Wish I heard about this some way other than Twitter,” he wrote. “I’m excited to watch, but bummed that Sam Winchester had no involvement whatsoever,” he continued.
Supernatural fans, rarely shy with their opinions, went into a tizzy over the drama. Padalecki’s tweet has 12.4K quote tweets and rising.
“This feels like an awkward family dinner,” a fan wrote, with others joining in offering relevant screengrabs and GIFs. Some fans even argued that everyone was reading it wrong, with one tweeting underlined passages in Deadline’s article and insisting they were clues that Padalecki must be joking.
Padalecki responded to the “joking” theory with a straightforward “no,” then added that he was “gutted.”
He also fired a comment at Supernatural producer Robbie Thompson that was a little more cutting: “Et tu brute??” It has since been deleted.
On Friday, however, Padalecki asked his stans to chill a bit (“Please PLEASE don’t send any hate or threats”) and came in with a message of detente shortly afterward.
He wrote that the Winchester bros have traveled “a lot of roads together, and sometimes those damn roads have bumps. Bumps don’t stop us.” Indeed, one could read between the lines of “the show is early in the process” to mean there might be room for Padalecki’s involvement in the new project at some point.
Ackles then shared similar words of affection in a fence-mending tweet.
— An Exclusive Deep Dive Into Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back
— Joseph Fiennes on His Handmaid’s Tale Fate
— The 10 Best Movies of 2021 (So Far)
— Jane Levy on the Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist Cancellation
— Is Luca Pixar’s First Gay Movie?
— How Physical Got Under Rose Byrne’s Skin
— What Is Bo Burnham’s Inside Really Trying to Say?
— Simu Liu Is Ready to Take On Marvel
— From the Archive: Jackie and Joan Collins, Queens of the Road
— Sign up for the “HWD Daily” newsletter for must-read industry and awards coverage—plus a special weekly edition of “Awards Insider.”