Jared and Jensen have strengthened their friendship on and off screen since the show began. Is that ideal in a season like this, when the bros are in a weird place emotionally and we know a little more about their connection with Lucifer and the angels?
We’re really lucky to have the two of them. As actors, they have such a comfort and respect and almost a shorthand with each other at this point, so they can just jump right in and really try some things that are a little edgy or different in terms of conflict and anger. They feel comfortable going to that place because they work together so well, and they know the other person can carry a heavy load.
There is a lot of meta humor involved, such as when the Winchesters go to a Supernatural fan convention or the knowing look Sam gives when House of Wax is mentioned. How do you balance that with the serious story at hand, and has it gotten easier over the years?
I would say that we’re probably pulling back on it from now on. My own personal feeling is we’re riding the hairy edge of just starting to go to that well too often and push it too far. Most of the time, we do it reasonably well. It’s a way to poke a little fun at ourselves and wink to the audience that we, as the writers of the show, don’t take ourselves too, too seriously. There’s nothing worse than self-important horror. At the end of the day, you’re in the business of scaring people and saying “Boo!” and ripping their hearts out and spraying blood on the screen, so to say that somehow I’m telling some epic religious story is a little pompous and disingenuous. We like to puncture that balloon, poke fun at the show and have a really healthy sense of humor about the characters and about ourselves.
Is the fallen angel Anna Milton (Julie McNiven) coming back in the second half of the season?
She’s coming back in a way that I think will be pretty surprising to the fans. She’s very different than the angel we met when we last saw her. She’s in an episode in which Sam, Dean, Castiel [Misha Collins] and Anna all travel back in time to interact with John and Mary, Sam and Dean’s parents, when they were young. We did that once successfully in season four, and we’re going back because there’s more of their story to tell. When they find them this time, they’re newlyweds and living in an apartment, and John’s trying to wrestle with keeping his job. It’s just interesting seeing little snapshots of what their family was like before the boys were born.
What other surprises do fans have in store?
We really pride ourselves on still being a series where people can just join the party. There are certainly the mythology episodes, but Sam and Dean go to an insane asylum [in next week’s episode], and there’s an episode with some body-switching going on in the second episode back. We’re doing a Valentine’s Day episode, and it’s probably the only Valentine’s Day episode of any show this year that begins with two people having sex, who then proceed to eat each other in a very violent and gory way. [Laughs] We’re doing zombies, and we’re actually sending the boys to heaven, which is a world on our show we’ve never seen before.
If there’s a sixth season, how do you top the apocalypse?
Well, the trick is to not go big but go intimate – at least those are the initial conversations we’ve had [if the show is picked up for a sixth season]. We always set up this five-year storyline, because in my heart of hearts, I just never imagine we’d actually go five years, much less beyond. We are going to climax the storyline and really wrap up the story of Satan and Michael and the apocalypse. The big question is, how do you follow that? We look at this as a unique challenge but also an opportunity to really launch a new storyline next year. We’re almost looking at it as the sequel to a movie. Rather than as a lot of genre shows do as they get on in years, becoming so convoluted and almost collapsing under their own mythology and getting to the point where you just can’t follow any of it anymore, we’re really looking forward to the opportunity of just sweeping it all clean and starting over with something else. We talk about returning to a stripped-down version of the show that’s almost similar to season one, in which the mythology was just as simple as finding their father and finding something that’s really personal and meaningful to Sam and Dean. One of the things that’s hard about the end of the world is sometimes it’s hard to have your characters emotionally connect with it, because it’s so big. But if their emotional storyline for, say, season six is to save a loved one, then that’s something you can really understand and get behind and actually have some really emotional storytelling that takes you through a lot of the scary episodes.
So you think about what you’ll do in the next season — how about who you’ll do it with? We don’t know yet if Sam and Dean will survive the end of the world. Are they in your plans?
Oh, absolutely. The one thing I can say is there's no Supernatural without Sam and Dean. If they’re not driving the bus, then I’m not sure there’s a bus to drive. Maybe they’ll survive this year and maybe they won’t, but we’re at the point where, hilariously, death on our show for our main characters has now basically become an inconvenience. [Laughs] Even if they don’t survive, they’ll certainly be back for a season six. I just don’t know how to tell this story without Sam and Dean.
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