By Alison Jones
AT SIX foot four inches tall and weighing in at 220lbs, most of it muscle, Supernatural star Jared Padalecki is a formidable presence both on and off screen.
But the man who battles all kinds of paranormal nasties with fists, knives, guns and even the power of his mind, on the cult TV show, reveals he is soft as a marshmallow inside when it comes to animals – and even cried at Marley & Me.
He was persuaded to watch the hit movie about a family and their disobedient dog by co-star Jensen Ackles, whom he noticed was looking suspiciously red-eyed after seeing it while the pair were flying back from Australia.
“I’ll admit it,” says Jared. “It totally got to me. I’d read the book and it was fantastic. If you haven’t seen it and you want to cry…”
Jared, who was in Birmingham recently to attend fan convention Asylum 3, dedicated to the show he stars in, is devoted to his dogs Harley, a mastiff, and Sadie, a German Shepherd. During holidays he even insists on driving them all the way from Vancouver, where the series is filmed, to his native Texas, after a friend warned him about the number of pets that die during flights. Even though he has been working solidly as an actor since he was a teenager, Jared enjoys stopping at the most run down motels en route.
“I like the cheapest hotels, the $39 specials where it smells like someone has been smoking 15 packs of cigarettes a day and you go ‘ewww, gross’. Awesome!”
“It is fun to stay in places you’d never stay in. I wouldn’t if I was by myself but with the dogs laying next to me growling at the door every time someone walks past, they’re not going to rob my room, they’ll rob the next place.”
Staying in no-tell motels is something he has in common with his character in Supernatural, Sam Winchester. Raised on the road with his older brother Dean (Ackles) by their late father John (Grey’s Anatomy star Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the brothers have been trained to fight everything from ghouls to ghosts, werewolves to wendigos ever since their mother was killed by a demon when Sam was a baby.
Though Sam gave up hunting monsters to go to college, he was dragged back into the fray by Dean. In the fourth season finale, which airs on ITV2 tonight, they face their toughest challenge yet as they try to stop a demonic plot to raise the Devil.
The story has allowed Jared to play a much darker Sam, as he has become a semi-vampire, drinking the blood of demon-possessed humans to try to become as powerful as the creatures they are fighting.
“I like Sam being a badass,” says Jared. “I’ve played the good guy for a while. When Supernatural started I was kind of the clean one but Sam has grown up. If we’d gone through 82 episodes of killing demons, ghosts and spirits and almost being killed by them and Sam was still like ‘hey guys, what’s up?’, I’d be a little worried but he’s been weathered by war.”
Jared has been taking acting classes since he was 12 but got his big break as gawky teen Dean Forester in Gilmore Girls.
After that he made a flurry of movies, but got tired of working away from home for long periods. He decided to settle down in Los Angeles and concentrate on TV work, then got Supernatural and had to move to Vancouver.
He and fellow Texan Jensen bonded so well that the latter bunked down in Jared’s guest room bedroom after the apartment he had been renting fell through. Jensen admitted it was also to support his co-star after he broke off his engagement to actress Sandra McCoy. However, Jensen is planning to rent his own place when they return to film series five.
“We’ll still hang out,” says Jared. “But it’ll probably be better not living together because we’d always be like ‘What’re you doing?’, ‘Nothing’, ‘Let’s have a beer’, then we’d stay up way too late when we had to get up early the next morning.”
Last year Jared was too busy filming Friday the 13th to attend Asylum. While he enjoys meeting the show’s loyal fans, he is occasionally left speechless by the depths of their adoration,
“The weirdest thing I have seen is someone had a tattoo of mine and Jensen’s faces. At first I thought it was fake. Then I realised ‘That’s me. In 30 years that’s going to be there’. That was eye-opening.”