It was the tweet heard ’round the Supernatural fandom, and now Jared Padalecki is explaining why he was left in the dark about former costar Jensen Ackles’ spinoff project, The Winchesters.
As you surely recall, Padalecki made his disappointment public shortly after news broke on June 24 that Ackles and his wife, Danneel, were shepherding a potential offshoot that would focus on young versions of Sam and Dean’s parents, John and Mary Winchester. In addition to exec-producing, Ackles is also set to narrate the project, which is now in development at The CW.
The day after the news broke (and his tweets of frustration/confusion were tweeted), Padalecki got on the phone with Ackles, who “just kind of explained, ‘Man, it’s not picked up yet. It’s not even written yet,'” Padalecki told The New York Times in a recent interview. “He knows and I know how much Supernatural means to both of us, and it wasn’t a secret he was trying to keep, necessarily. It was just something that he didn’t feel really even existed yet. But he has been like: ‘Hey, I’ll let you know what’s going on.'”
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But the evening before the telephone catch-up, Padalecki reacted to the news by tweeting at Ackles, “Dude. Happy for you. Wish I heard about this some way other than Twitter. I’m excited to watch, but bummed that Sam Winchester had no involvement whatsoever.” When a fan then suggested Padalecki’s message “has GOTTA be a bad joke,” Padalecki assured, “No. It’s not. This is the first I’ve heard about it. I’m gutted.”
The next day, after getting on the phone with Ackles, Padalecki tweeted that all was fine between the Winchester brothers: “@JensenAckles and I had a great talk, as we do often, and things are good,” he wrote. “The show is early in the process with miles to go. We’ve travelled a lot of roads together, and sometimes those damn roads have bumps. Bumps don’t stop us. Once brothers, always brothers.”
In the Times interview, Padalecki acknowledged that the social media “feud” got out of hand.
“It was just one of those things that, because it was online and people were assuming I was part of it, I really wanted to just say: ‘Hey, I’m not keeping a secret from you guys. I just don’t know about this,'” he explained. “And I should be old enough to know better than to put something out there and expect that people will understand. It’s hard to tweet a specific tone. If you write it online, it’s like, ‘Oh, he doesn’t know! They’re going to kill each other! The world is ending!’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no.’ I try to avoid social media as much as possible because of that.”
