For Countdown star Jensen Ackles, there’s something slightly freeing about playing a character who is dying from a brain tumor. Freeing and fun, oddly enough.
Sitting down with DECIDER to chat about his new Prime Video series, the Supernatural alum shared that getting into the head of Mark Meachum — an LAPD officer who is secretly battling a glioblastoma — was a new trial and one that gave him perspective on his own life and experiences.
“It was certainly a fun aspect to play. I say fun, you know, in quotation marks. But in my opinion, it gives layers to the character,” Ackles explained. “It gives layers to the story and layers to the relationships that he forms on the show.”
In the action-thriller, Ackles’ character is recruited by FBI director Nathan Blythe (Eric Dane) to join a covert team of agents and officers from various law enforcement bodies to stop an impending terrorist attack on Los Angeles. It all begins with the death of a well-respected FBI agent who was gunned down in public and whose death leads to the discovery of a shipment of fissile materials that could wipe out the city.
Set against the backdrop of a ticking clock with the team racing to stop the unknown attackers, Ackles’ Meachum is dealing with a time bomb of his own that both weighs on his conscience and compels him to take more risks than he probably should. For the charact
“This guy’s a maverick, he’s going to push the envelope. He’s going to piss off his superior officer. This was something that he was internalizing and having to deal with. And I think there are a lot of people that can relate to that with their own world,” he added.
“This is a guy didn’t choose to sit down and let the world swallow him up, he took that as a, ‘Okay, well, if I’m gonna go out, then I’m going to go out guns blazing and I’m to do everything I can to hang my hat on something that I can be proud,’” he said.
Check out DECIDER’s full interview with Ackles below.
DECIDER: I’m excited to talk about the show. I am not typically [all for] this genre, but it was great.
JENSEN ACKLES: Thank you, thank you. I’m excited about it. Derek [Haas], he generally writes procedural stuff. He comes from the Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., all that stuff. He’s a Dick Wolf guy. But my God, is he incredibly talented and just has so much to say. And I love that he took kind of what he knew there and expanded it into this elevated, high-stakes, high-energy, fast-paced kind of situation. Great characters that he wrote. And yeah, I’m really excited about it.
He definitely cut his teeth in broadcast, he wrote some 250 episodes in the Chicago-verse. He knows what he’s doing and it shows here. How did this first come to you?
I had to deal with Amazon, Derek had to deal with Amazon, they were the dating app that we used to find each other and they put us together. I had some conversations with some other shows and some other showrunners and they pitched me some ideas and I was like, “Okay, cool, yeah.” But then, when Derek came around, I felt like there was a language that he and I spoke just so easily. And he comes from broadcast, I come from broadcast. I just finished up 15 seasons on a broadcast show… He just seemed like somebody who would build a sandbox that I really wanted to play in. And that’s kind of where we ended up. And so I met with him, I flew out to LA and had lunch and we talked a little bit about the story and we talked a lot about each other. From there, it was like, okay, we’re off to the races.
And then he went to town and wrote all 13 scripts, which is unheard of. It’s very rare for one showrunner to write all of the scripts. Usually, you have a writing team and you designate, you know, “this episode to this writer, this episode to this writing team.” He did it all, so it was all up there. And I think it shows because there’s a continuity that you get with that that I’m not familiar with. I’m used to my character having a little different voice with this writer and I have to kind of maybe massage the dialogue a bit to get it back to what I know and what feels right for me. And with Derek, there was none of that. It was, he wrote everything from tip to stern.
I feel the consistency from one episode to the next. For you, what was it like jumping from a 22 or 24-episode broadcast show to this [13-episode] show? Was it also a sigh of relief getting to be part of this massive ensemble?
I jumped from doing the 23 episodes of Supernatural into doing eight episodes on The Boys which was also a massive ensemble. So I was really just kind of coming into somebody else’s house there and just making sure that I cleared my plate at the end of dinner. I mean, when they said 13 episodes, everybody was like, “Oh my gosh, that’s going to take forever.” I was like, “I got that. We’re good, we’re totally fine.” I’ve conditioned for that, I’m wired for that.
You have such an interesting character in this because he’s this tough-shelled kind of cop persona but then he also is facing his mortality with the glioblastoma and I’m wondering how it has made you think about your own life and your own legacy?
It was certainly a fun aspect to play. I say “fun,” you know, in quotation marks. But in my opinion, it gives layers to the character. It gives layers to the story and layers to the relationships that he forms on the show. And so it’s not just a straightforward, like this guy is a renegade. This guy’s a maverick. He’s going to push the envelope. He’s going to piss off his superior officer. This was something that he was internalizing and having to deal with. And I’ve known people who are dealing with, you know, afflictions or conditions or, you know, serious conditions. And so for me, it was like, “Well, this is a guy who didn’t choose to lay down. This is a guy who didn’t choose to sit down and let the world swallow him up.” He took that as a, “Okay, well, if I’m gonna go out, then I’m going to go out guns blazing and I’m to do everything I can to hang my hat on something that I can be proud of” as opposed to just being like, “Well, that’s it for me. Time’s been real, peace.” And I love that aspect. I love the fact that Derek incorporated that aspect into this character.
One thing I love about this genre is that it produces some of the, maybe not intentionally, but incredibly funny lines like “I’ll ride or die any day with blurred lines.”And it’s so cop drama-esque. As an actor, when you read a line like that on the page, do you have fun with it or do you try and just give it as serious of a read as it comes across on the stage?
The beautiful thing about what I do is I get to have multiple takes and multiple opportunities to play around with the words. And Derek wrote such amazing dialogue and wrote such great characters and such a great story. Ask any director that worked on Countdown, after take two, I’m going off, I’m gonna try something new. I’m going to flavor in something else. I’m maybe trying to make a line funny that wasn’t funny. I’m maybe trying to make a funny line serious. And I think that that’s also a compliment to the set that Derek had built and has built and the crew and the cast that allow those kind of happy things to happen. We call them happy accidents and there are a lot of them in the show.
Yeah, I think it’s an actor’s job to make the editor’s job harder.
And I feel like that’s so true. I agree a thousand percent.
The first three episodes of Countdown are now streaming on Prime Video. New episodes drop on Wednesdays through September 3.
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