Deep from the heart of Texas, Jared Padalecki is stepping into the boots of action icon Chuck Norris as he stars in the title role of the new series Walker, starting January 21, 2021 on The CW.
Walker — “Pilot” — Pictured: Jared Padalecki as Cordell Walker — Photo: Rebecca Brenneman/The CW — © 2021 The CW Network, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Jared Padalecki is a familiar face on The CW network having starred in their Supernatural series chasing demons for 15 seasons. Now he’s chasing cooks in the reboot to Walker, Texas Ranger which had Norris giving the bad guys a taste of his martial arts skills from 1993 to 2001 on CBS.
Padalecki recently talked about Walker during the CW’s virtual interview to promote the show with the Television Critics Association, and noted he was a fan of the original Walker, Texas Ranger. Jared said, “I did grow up in San Antonio, Texas, and Walker was certainly on the TV more times than I can count. I don’t know if I would win a trivia game about the original Walker Texas Ranger, but I did grow up watching the show and certainly after shooting Supernatural for 15 and a half years it was a change. To give a shout-out to Anna (producer-showrunner, Anna Fricke) and our writers, the character they wrote for this version of Walker is so crystal clear and different than Sam Winchester, that I’d have to try really hard to kind of bleed the two together. And so it was a lot of work, but it was a seamless change from 15 years on Supernatural as Sam Winchester to the next 15 years on Walker as Cordell Walker. We’re pretty excited about it.”
Why did Padalecki want to do the show? Jared got excited when he talked about the morality of the stories they want to tell and explained, “Okay, yeah, I’ll go into a little bit of my initial relationship with this show and this character. So a few years back when, when there were a lot of human beings coming from South of the American border into America and our society seemed to want to maybe put some people in cages and separate families, I read a story about a law enforcement agent who couldn’t bring themselves simply put to put a three-year-old in the cage and take them away from their parents. And they said something to the effect of, you know, I have a three-year-old, I couldn’t bring myself to do that. And, and that empathy and that emotion struck me as something, you know, caught between the inevitable rock and a hard place where you’re bound by duty, but you still have moral code and you see people as human beings, not as perpetrators or heroes.”
Padalecki continued, “So we started talking about how interesting it would be to see that story told, where somebody who is a proud government worker for law enforcement, still kind of thinks to themselves there might be a better way. And some of these laws are old and they’re not nuanced. And Anna and I talk a lot about the edge of the coin. You know, they always say there are two sides to a coin – heads or tails, but there’s also a third edge to the coin, the third side of the coin, the edge of the coin. Where somebody is bound by their duty and by sense of safety and helping themselves and helping others, but also a family man or family woman who has friends and, and family from all walks of life. Where does that all meet? We talked about wanting to pose questions, as opposed to sort of proselytize our beliefs and just force answers down our viewers throats.” The show succeeds at bringing those conflicting side together in a great family drama.
Tune in Walker, Thursday nights on The CW.
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