We love Misha Collins. Last September we talked with the then-new Supernatural star about developing the role of Castiel and what it was like to work with Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki. Then in March
we talked with him again, this time about his future on Supernatural, the possibility of a sixth season for the series and his grandmother’s reaction to his appearence on Nip/Tuck.
On the heels of last Thursday’s Misha-centric episode “The Rapture”, the Supernatural actor was great enough to check in with us again. In our latest conversation he tells us why he thinks Castiel is now taking Heaven’s company line with Sam and Dean, shares his personal plans for the summer, and answers the questions you sent us on our Supernatural Twitter site.
Hi, this is John from BuddyTV and I’m talking to Misha Collins from Supernatural. How’s it going?
Great!
You just had the big episode – the big Castiel episode – “The Rapture.” What was it like getting to play a different character and explore Castiel’s back story?
It was great! It was great to get out of the trench coat for a few hours. Yeah. It was fun to play someone who actually had some emotions and interacted on a more human level for a change.
Did it help to inform anything about how you had been playing the character?
No, I don’t think so. I wish I could say “Yes! Yes, it’s all very clear to me now and I’m completely satisfied.” No. I feel like the Jimmy backstory actually – by some miracle – was something like I kind of had imagined the backstory to be – that Castiel had inhabited the vessel of a willing participant somehow, and he’d been pious and maybe a little bit of a zealot, which I think was true of Jimmy. Moving forward I think it makes it kind of complicated. Because moving forward, now I know that Jimmy is still somehow trapped inside of Castiel, and that there’s another pair of eyes watching everything from inside. That’s going to be really interesting.
We also saw Castiel take a few steps back when he came back, then. How do you feel about Castiel going back to that hard line?
I think that it gives him a lot of room to grow, which is good. I think that it ups the stakes for Castiel. It is really important for him to follow the orders of his heavenly commanders. He had been straying from the party line a bit. Now he’s back in order and I think that if he’s going to help Sam or Dean in the future it’s going to make those decisions that much more difficult. So I think it ups the stakes for him and it probably puts some distance between him and the boys. Yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see how it plays out.
It seemed watching it that Castiel is [take the party line] but he still doesn’t quite go along with that.
It’s not like he went upstairs and was lobotomizes and now he’s a totally different personality. I think he went up to heaven and he was tortured, and he was indoctrinated and now he’s back on board. But he’s still the same angel. So he’s not inherently a totally different being at this point.
Is the idea that there’s torture in Heaven something that you’ve discussed? Or is that something that you’re trying to read into it?
That is something that I am reading into it.
So you’re not really sure exactly how Heaven ‘is’ in this Supernatural world?
No, I mean, it hasn’t been any more clearly defined for me than it has for anyone else. I just operate with my imagination. But it seems like the clues kind of line up there – the way Anna talked about it being a very, very bad thing to be dragged back upstairs. The intensity with which she said that made it sound like something bad was happening to Castiel. Earlier in the season disobedience was likened in the dialogue with murder one on Earth. So it’s clear that it is hierarchical and that there are rules that are not to be broken, and there are consequences if they are. Now what those consequences are, what angelic torture looks like if it happens, I don’t know. I imagine it’s not all friendly up there on the clouds.
Yeah. We also asked some of the Supernatural fans following us on Twitter what they’d like to know. We saw the difference in the voice and the mannerisms between Castiel and Jimmy, and listening to you it sounds like Jimmy is more you. So Angie wants to know how you put on that gruff Castiel voice. Is that at all straining for you?
It’s not terribly straining. So far I’ve been able to endure. I think that my real voice is probably somewhere between the two. I pushed it to a more boyish kind of sound with Jimmy to make the contrast stronger. I made the decision early on to go with a gruff, resonant voice because it says in the first script that Castiel’s real voice was blowing out windows. And so I thought ‘Oh, okay, so he should have a very deep, serious voice.’ The character has lasted for much longer than I expected.
Do you have any plans for the summer hiatus off the show until next season starts?
Yes. I am going to go on a long bike touring trip. I am going to go to a convention in Birmingham. And I am going to go up to Vancouver and rent a house up there for next season.
-John Kubicek, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image courtesy of JSquared Photography)
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Senior Writer, BuddyTV
John watches nearly every show on TV, but he specializes in sci-fi/fantasy like The Vampire Diaries, Supernatural and True Blood. However, he can also be found writing about everything from Survivor and Glee to One Tree Hill and Smallville.
