Winchesters Bosses Talk Telling A Love Story While Hunting, Not Rewriting History And Supernatural Cameos

The Winchesters isn't setting out to rewrite John and Mary's past, despite what appears to be a mythology-bending premise.

Premiering Tuesday at 8/7c on The CW, the Supernatural prequel follows Dean and Sam's parents (played by The In Between's Drake Rodger and American Housewife's Meg Donnelly) as they fall in love and hunt monsters together in the 1970s. But the question that's been on every Supernatural fan's mind since the spinoff was first announced is: How is that possible, given that the mothership series told us that John only learned of demons after Mary died?!

While The Winchesters "definitely takes a different road," writer/showrunner Robbie Thompson assures TVLine, "We are acutely aware of all the continuity, obviously, of Supernatural, but also how we're deviating from it, and it's all part of the story that we're telling. We are going to resolve these issues in this first season. But what I can guarantee folks is we are definitely aware of those things, and none of this, if we've done our jobs right, is going to rewrite any of the past. It'll all sort of be explained, though, as part of the mystery of our first season."

Jensen Ackles, who serves as an executive producer on the spinoff alongside his wife Danneel Ackles and narrates as Dean Winchester, also expressed his desire to not change history during a recent virtual panel for the show.

"We don't want the picture of Dean and Sam to start being erased," Ackles said. "This is not what we've set out to do. We're trying to preserve everything that we possibly can on the mothership. I think Robbie and his crack team of writers have come up with [a] way of doing that is servicing this show just as much as it will be servicing Supernatural."

Thompson notes that even though The Winchesters is presenting a different story of how John and Mary met, the characters still have the same essence of the ones viewers got to know on Supernatural.

"John is still somebody who's troubled by his past, and some of that is the recent past of his experience in Vietnam, and then some of that is, from his perspective, losing his dad at a young age, or at least his dad being out of the picture from a young age," Thompson shares. "And Mary is still dealing with the fact that she was born into a world where she was sort of drafted into a war she had no choice to be a part of."

For Thompson, getting to really dig into Dean and Sam's parents was one of the main things that drew him to the project when Jensen and Danneel Ackles presented it to him. "John and Mary are really, really fascinating characters," Thompson says. "When I left Supernatural at the end of Season 11, they were just bringing Mary back into the story, and one of the regrets I had from walking away was like, oh, I really wanted a chance to write that character."

Read on as Thompson and Jensen Ackles detail what else you need to know about the spinoff, including whether we'll see some Supernatural vets and just what made Rodger and Donnelly the perfect John and Mary.

When it comes to John and Mary, Jensen Ackles is something of an expert. After all, the actor has worked with every iteration of the characters on Supernatural, from Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Samantha Smith as grown-up John and Mary to Matt Cohen and Amy Gumenick as the young adult versions. So what was it about Rodger and Donnelly's auditions that evoked the spirit of those characters and performances for Ackles? Surprisingly, they didn't remind him of John and Mary, but two other Winchesters.

"Drake really jumped off very quickly as somebody that almost seemed like a hybrid of Dean and Sam, not necessarily a replica of a previous John Winchester," Ackles shared during a virtual panel. "So that was really interesting to all of us, because this is pre-John turning into the person that we really knew and, obviously, that Jeffrey Morgan played. So there was a kind of innocence, a youthfulness and a thirst for life that Drake brought to this character that was really unique and refreshing. But it reminded me of somebody that could very easily be the father of those two brothers."

John F. Showalter, who helmed 26 episodes of Supernatural, even said while directing Rodger during an Episode 4 scene, "'Oh, I haven't seen Jared [Padalecki] in a while,'" Thompson recalled. "It was like a mannerism, some of the comedy chops that we were [similar to Jared]."

As for Donnelly, the actress was already a familiar face in the Ackles household, thanks to her work on Disney Channel. "There was a look and there was a confidence," Ackles said of Donnelly's tryout. "There was almost a Dean-esque quality to the way that she was playing Mary, which I felt the role really needed. And she was really the only one that was bringing that. It caught all of our attention."

Fun fact: Casting director Robert J. Ulrich cast both Supernatural and The Winchesters.

To paraphrase Taylor Swift, it's a love story, baby. While Supernatural was about familial bonds, at the center of the spinoff is a budding romantic relationship, something which the mothership series didn't get to focus on too much during its run. Getting to really explore a romance amidst the world of monsters and demon hunting "was the biggest appeal when Jensen and Danneel talked to me about it," Thompson shares, adding that the love story has "been the thing that I found the most both challenging and rewarding in this process of trying to figure out how do we show a romantic story in a world with pretty high stakes, and how do we show two characters that are from different worlds, in some senses, coming together, and then the longer form question of, how do you sustain that and show them coming closer together and falling apart?"

"It was pretty clear in the Supernatural canon that things weren't always rosy between the two of them either," Thompson continues, "and so being able to dip into that has just been really fun, to be honest with you, and it was the thing that was the most exciting to me because it felt really challenging."

Unlike John's father Henry Winchester and Mary's parents Samuel and Deanna Campbell, whom viewers met on Supernatural, Dean and Sam's paternal grandmother Millie (played by Legacies' Bianca Kajlich) is something of a blank slate, allowing the spinoff unravel a previously unexplored character. "There wasn't a lot said about her [on Supernatural]," Thompson notes. "It's been really fun turning those cards over, and also working on that character with Bianca, who's just terrific and has done an amazing job of taking what's on the page and then also bringing her own special spin on it."

Rounding out the ensemble are a trio of allies even longtime Supernatural viewers have yet to meet: hunter-in-training Latika (Nida Khurshid), fun-loving hunter Carlos (Jonathan "Jojo" Fleites) and rare book emporium owner Ada (Motherland: Fort Salem's Demetria McKinney). Since all three are new to the mythology, "these are all wonderful characters that you don't have to do any homework on," Thompson points out. But if any Supernatural newbies are feeling ambitious (there are 327 episodes to binge!), Thompson says with a laugh, "I would recommend to anybody, if for some reason they haven't seen it, just to watch the pilot, and then I dare them to stop."

Given that many Supernatural characters existed in the 1970s, and that time travel and magical shenanigans are a thing in this universe, longtime viewers can expect to see "some very familiar faces that are going to be coming up in an episode we're going to shoot in a couple of days," Thompson revealed during a recent virtual panel for the show.

"And then some more that I can't even reveal. Hopefully, someone that's on the Zoom, as well, at a certain point. I'm looking at you, Ackles," the EP added with a laugh. "And we also have plans not just to bring back some of our familiar faces, but younger versions of the characters that maybe we haven't seen yet."