Supernatural actors Rob Benedict, who played writer Chuck Shurley who penned a fictionalized bio of demon hunters Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) and was later revealed as God, and Richard Speight, Jr. (Archangel Gabriel, sometimes disguised as the trickster demigod Loki) have been doing the conventions together for a while now; they’ve even hosted the show’s San Diego Comic-Con panel.
And so, it should be no surprise that they chose to speak to us together for TV Guide Magazine’s Supernatural Afterlife: 20th Anniversary Special issue, for the show’s 20th anniversary, at a fan convention in New Jersey this spring.
Why do this interview together?
Rob Benedict: We come as a package.
Since we’re doing this interview at a Supernatural convention, what do you like most about doing these cons? What do they mean to you?
Richard Speight Jr: It’s the camaraderie. The things that’s the most fun is we’ve taken the opportunity to promote a show and turned it into a live theatrical experience. Rob and I actually met doing conventions, not on the show. I only was on set with him since I directed him in the later years. I didn’t work with the majority of people on camera until those years. We mostly met at conventions, which were stagnant and separate at the time and most of us barely crossed path. Over the years, we reformed them. I could give a lot of credit to Matt Cohen and Rob and myself for reshaping what conventions are. We added Rob’s band Louden Swain, and Rob and I took over the hosting duties. And it has become an exercise in improv and being creative in how we entertain people. Rob and I get up on stage every morning, and we have a singular goal: to make each other laugh. But in so doing, we also make the audience laugh and bring them in on the experience.
Jack Rowand / © THE CW / courtesy everett collection
Benedict: The real connection I always feel at a convention is singing on stage your own songs and your own lyrics. It’s a very vulnerable thing to do. Conventions have the best audiences. It doesn’t feel like work. It’s really fun for us. And we really do feel like a traveling circus sometimes rolling into town.
Speight: At the end of the day, Rob and I are entertainers. That’s what we got into the entertainment field to do. If we’re going to sign autographs, if we’re going to do photos, we’re going to surround those opportunities and experiences with entertainment. It wasn’t necessarily what we were hired to do,. but we just found ways to do it because I felt weird taking people’s money just to stand there. If I’m going to be here and you’re going to pay, then I’m going to make this awesome for me and then hopefully also for you. Rob has the same mind set. We just started being goofy, and that turned into taking over the format of the whole thing.
Talk about your Saturday night concerts.
Speight: It’s always a really special moment. I get to play with the band, and then people from the show come up and join us. We have so much talent among these actors.
Who are some of the SPN actors who join in?
Speight: Jensen, Richard, Kim Rhodes, Briana Buckmaster, Gil McKinney, Julie McNiven. Ruth Connell used to sing with us.
Benedict: Didn’t Osric Chau used to sing with us back in the day?
Speight: Wow, yeah. There’s a live CD, Saturday Night Special, that has a lot of people on it. Everybody really steps up on Saturday night do this show.
What are some memorable con memories?
RS: I will tell you the first time I walked into a hotel at a Chicago convention, the fact that everybody there knew who I was was bizarre. I live my life as a not famous guy but when I come to a conventions hotel, I’m a superstar. It is such an interesting experience that Rob and I turned it into a 10-episode sitcom, Kings of Con, on Prime. We use a lot of the show’s actors, including Jensen and Misha. It’s the story of the escapades happening behind the scenes. We’ve learned the crazy people aren’t the fans, they’re great and normal. The crazy people are the actors hired to be there.
Benedict: The real drama happens behind the scenes.
Speight: We were inspired by our relationship with the fans. That’s who we did it for.
If you were to write a letter to the fans, what would you say?
Speight: It would be short: “Thank you.” Because no fans means no TV show. It doesn’t just start at a convention. If they don’t watch the show, they don’t latch onto the character. If you don’t show that affection in person by showing up to the events, then we’re not in these chairs doing interviews. It’s not just a numeric goal you’re going for with an audience. In this case, in convention land, it’s the human interaction. It’s different than doing something in a vacuum. We get to interact with people who love the show, which is why we work hard to show we love them back by giving them a lot of bang for their buck.
Benedict: [Mine] would be a similar letter.
Speight: We’d just sign it, Rich ‘n’ Rob.
Benedict: I’ve been on other shows that have “fandoms.” There’s nothing quite like this “fandom,” which I’ll call family, because it feels more like that. This fan group kept the show on the air for 15 seasons..
Speight: And would have kept it on longer.
Benedict: And has now kept these conventions alive five years after the show ended. Everyone thought it would be over after the show was over. It’s still going. We still do one or two of these a month. So, “Thank you for help keeping it alive, and you know that you are more than just fans to us.”
Colin Bentley/The CW
Do you think there will ever be some kind of Supernatural revival, whether a limited series or a one-time TV reunion?
Benedict: I’ll preface by saying we know nothing and no one said anything. But I can see a world where they do some kind of show.
Speight: It’s not even complicated to think about. If Jared and Jensen said yes, it would be in production five minutes ago. It’s not really hard to fathom.
Benedict: The question is, would Rich and I be in it? [Laughs]
Speight: Or would we be allowed to visit the set? But no, reimagining the show in terms of a two-hour movie or a limited series, I’m sure it’s whatever those two would like it to be. Because the audience is there and from just a business standpoint, networks, Warner Bros. know that they would green light it in a heartbeat.
Benedict: They’d be silly not to do it.
Almost every day in one of my entertainment feeds is some kind of story about Supernatural. Is there a secret that you can share about being on Supernatural?
Speight: I started directing on the show in Season 11. I had been directing commercials at that point, but not network television. … Jared and Jensen weren’t shy about giving me heaps of grief about now being the captain of the ship. I was wanting to be sure I did it right. I might have overshot, let’s say. They started calling me Speighteen takes. That was my nickname for a while.
Benedict: I have a funny story. One time when I was up there shooting Season 15, it was around Halloween and someone from the crew had a Halloween party and Jensen was like, “Let’s go. I got a great idea. We’re going to go as Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” They went to the costume department, got us an exact replica of what they wore in the movie. We put them on, and Jensen looks exactly like Brad Pitt and I look nothing like Leo DiCaprio, so everybody knew exactly who he was and I got, “Who are you?”
If your characters are ever onscreen again, what do you think they’d be up to now?
Benedict: There are two versions of Chuck. There’s a version that people probably want it to be, which is Chuck by himself, living in a broken-down gas station, sleeping on a cot, and maybe starting to write again. I like to be positive. [Laughs] Or there’s a world where he’s written everything [including The Bible] and written himself not being God anymore and given [the job] to Jack [Alexander Calvert]. But there could be another book to close in the post-final, a version where he’s kind of cool and he’s still in charge.
Speight: Like Chuck, Archangel Gabriel could have several futures. If Gabriel had continued down the rabbit hole, he’d be running a strip joint like The Sopranos ,called Suckerz with a picture of a seductive lollipop on the front.. That’s the not-so-great side of what happened to him. On the positive side, what I would like to see happen is a family reunion. You get Gabriel back with Lucifer and Balthazar, everybody who’s a high-ranking angel and dad, and they take a road trip to Disney World.
Talk about your characters’ deaths through the seasons and when you found out you’d be a goner — at least for a while.
Speight: I died so many times. When did I find out I would live? I died in [my] first episode. It turned I wasn’t dead, but I did die. I died at least three times.
Benedict: I never actually died. Chuck gets defeated, but I never died.
Speight: We’d find out when you got the script. You’d go, “Oh, I’m dead!” [Laughs] They weren’t good at giving advanced warning.
Rich, did you know the first time you died that you would come back?
Speight: No. The first time, I just was doing a one-off as a janitor-turned-Trickster. I didn’t know that there was any longevity to the character. Rob and I host the only existing Supernatural PR property right now, the official Supernatural podcast, Supernatural Then and Now. And in that rewatch podcast, which is a companion piece to the show, we watch episodes and interview the people behind it. And in interviewing [Supernatural’s first showrunner] Eric Kripke, we found out that a lot of times, including in the scenario you’re talking about, they didn’t know that I, for example, was going come back. They would build these character arcs and assume they’re one-offs. But if it worked and it made sense to utilize that character in a different capacity and they loved how the actor played it, they would get them back. In my first episode, you see that the Trickster isn’t dead, he reveals himself to still be standing there once the body goes away. So we know he is not dead dead, but there’s nothing indicating he’ll return because so many characters live on and don’t return. I got lucky that they figured out a way to make my character part of the bigger mythology of the show. I did the first one, didn’t know I would ever come back, then I got called again a year later! But I never truly knew.
Rob, did you know Sam and Dean’s fictionalized biographer Chuck would be God?
Benedict: No, I didn’t know. It was great having Eric Kripke on our podcast because we got to ask him some of these questions. After my first episode, I was like, “It says to be continued on my script,” and Misha Collins said, “They all say that. “
Speight: God, that does mess with your head when you’re a hired gun. You get all excited only to find out, oh, [you might not be back].
Do you have a favorite episode?
Benedict: “The French Mistake” is pretty fantastic.
Speight: What impresses me is how great the early episodes were. They were shot on film and looked quite dark cinematically. They could be quite gruesome back then. The way they killed Sterling K. Brown‘s character, Gordon — he got decapitated by razor blades!
Benedict: The fact that Sterling K. Brown is in the show!
Speight: “Heart” was one of my favorited. It was the one where Dean and Sam tried to save a girl who turned out to be a werewolf and eventually we hear Sam shoot her. It is brutal, and the acting is unreal. The show has unbelievable storylines, super creative monsters, unique storytelling, but its core is Jared and Jensen being great actors. Those two dudes can deliver to a high level, they can be funny, but when they need to land the plane, man, they can be dramatic. Before I was on the show, I watched these two young actors in their early 20s just doing cinema-level work week in, week out.
Supernatural has one of the biggest TV show fan cultures, along with the Star Trek franchise. What is it about this little horror show that spans generations in viewership and also brings fans to conventions year after year to buy merch, watch panels, and meet cast members?
Speight: It’s always been about fathers and sons. It’s always been about people. The backdrop is monsters, but the core of the show –
Benedict: — is family.
Speight: Yes. At the end of the day, it’s about two little boys who were raised by a broken man seeking revenge for the death of his wife. You put that in a badass car and send it across the United States encountering various demons, both personal and physical, and it’s intoxicating to watch. Also from a production standpoint, they did themselves a massive favor by setting it in essentially a timeless middle America, so, at no point does the show feel dated. Occasionally, an old cell phone comes up, occasionally, an old computer terminal, but the scene in, scene out is at a motel, a diner, a dive bar on the road. These are timeless images, denim, flannel jackets. It’s very hard to pinpoint the time in the same way it’s hard to pinpoint it in Star Trek. In a very, very creative way, it’s a period piece — only the period isn’t specifically named.
Benedict: I also think that there’s an element that you almost can’t explain. It’s a phenomenon. It’s a great show, the writing is terrific, the acting’s great, and they get high-level guest stars. There’s.an element, it’s very Americana, but the show’s loved all over the world.
There are international conventions. Are the fans abroad different from those in the States?
Benedict: Wherever we go around the world — Australia, Germany France, England, Brazil — they’re the same kind of fans, just with the flavor of whatever country you’re in. When we go to Rome, one of the things we like is there’s like 23 countries represented at that convention. People come from Japan, from Croatia, from places we don’t expect.
It’s interesting that Supernatural is popular in both Red and Blue states.
Benedict: On Twitter, around Season 14, there was a survey of the Top 10 Democrat-watched shows, and the Top 10 Republican-watched shows. We were on both those lists.
Speight: I will say that Supernatural doesn’t take a side. Humanity doesn’t take a side, heart doesn’t take a side, family doesn’t take a side. People relate to this because they see in themselves human struggle reflected on the show. Not perfection. There are two good-looking dudes, but other than that, they’re very flawed human beings from a broken family situation, just struggling to find what’s right in the world. And I think everybody can relate to that. It helps that Jared and Jensen are both good and hot.
Supernatural, Complete Series, Streaming Now, Netflix
For a deep-dive into 20 years of Supernatural, from behind-the-scenes scoop to exclusive cast interviews, photos, and fan stories, pick up a copy of TV Guide Magazine’s Supernatural Afterlife: 20th Anniversary Special issue, available on newsstands and for order online at Supernatural.TVGM2025.com.
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