'Supernatural' Star Jensen Ackles Finally Got To Work With Kansas!

“Supernatural” star Jensen Ackles just made another dream come true.

Not only did he reunite with on-screen brother Jared Padalecki to direct an episode of his CW show “Walker,” but he also got a chance to work with the band Kansas. The “Dark Angel” star dished on the experience to Entertainment Weekly.

Although “Walker” is a different CW show than the one he’s used to, he still described it as “a friendly set.” He said, “Jared had laid the groundwork of like, ‘This is my brother. I'm here because of what he and I built together.’ He gave a great speech to the whole crew, saying, ‘We wouldn't be here without the work that this guy did with me.’”

Ackles joked, “I was vouched for by the commander-in-chief, so although I was a guest in someone else's house, it was a house that felt very welcoming.”

He also said that the character of Walker feels more like his real-life persona than his “Supernatural” character of Sam Winchester.

“Funny enough, I feel like Walker is probably more like Jared than Sam was, not necessarily in actual character development, but just in mannerisms and reactionary things, the nuances of what Jared's doing,” Ackles explained. “I think this feels a little closer to him, which is great because who knows him better than him? It was fun to get back into the shorthand with him with performance notes, with technical notes. I can even use a reference to a movie and he knows that I'm actually giving him a note. There's nobody else I can do that with. He and I have that, and we'll always have that. That's not something that fades away.”

Ackles was asked how the Kansas interview came about. Although the interviewer jokingly asked, “Did they just call you up one day and say, ‘P.S. We have Kansas?’”, Ackles replied, “Basically, yeah.”

“They were like, ‘We're writing that script right now, but we just found out Kansas is actually going to be in Austin playing one night and it happens to be three days before you start working,’” Ackles explained. “So I was in prep and basically they broke the main unit early on the previous episode so that they could do a full company move over to the Moody Theater in downtown Austin and we could set up and shoot, essentially, a rock concert. So I shot that while in prep, and then a couple of days later we started rolling on principal photography for me.”

To help prepare for the shoot, Ackles said that he “basically went back and watched a bunch of rock concerts to see how they were directed and then got with my DP, Peter Kowalski, who, funny enough, was the A camera operator from Dawson's Creek.”

“So that was a great reunion, and he and I worked really well together,” he explained. “We spent half a day in the Moody Theater shooting a rock concert with Kansas as our subject. And they were awesome. They were like, ‘How many times do you want us to do it?’ We were like, ‘Three times max,’ and they said, ‘We can do it three, we can do it five, whatever you need.’ They were so accommodating and so cool, as I knew they would be.”

Although Kansas was supposed to make an appearance in the “Supernatural” finale, that plan was scrapped due to COVID-19 restrictions that were being implemented at the time.

Ackles said, “They were also really excited that they were getting to scratch an itch that didn't get scratched. I didn't know this, but they were literally at the airport and some of them were getting on a plane to come to Vancouver [where ‘Supernatural’ was filmed] when they got called and told, ‘Sorry, COVID, we're shutting down.’ So that's how close we were to having that experience with them. The fact that we got to do that in any capacity felt like we got to scratch an itch that needed to be scratched.”

Ackles also teased that fans should on the lookout for some “Supernatural” Easter eggs in his episode of “Walker.” He explained that “Katherine Alyse, who wrote the episode, knows Supernatural very well and essentially wrote a lot of Easter eggs. I was either like, ‘Oh, I can absolutely do that’ or, ‘I can level that up.’ We definitely tried to pepper in the Easter eggs when we could.”

“Walker” airs Thursday nights on the CW.