Sera Gamble Interview – Comic Con Press Room 2009
Sera Gamble came over to our table and considering I’ve emailed her a few times and conducted two interviews, an introduction was going to happen. No publicist on a schedule was going to ruin that. I leaned over and told her right off the bat I was getting my fan girl moment out of the way. I introduced myself, and refreshingly she knew who I was. Furthermore, she was actually pleased to meet me. So, I everything else after that was just a bonus. (Sorry for the blurry picture. It was the best I got.)
So how does it feel being the only female writer on the staff there?
SG: No, we have another female writer, Julie Siege.
And how is writing process being presented with the show being such a male oriented show.
SG: It’s fine. I think it’s probably commiserate with the statics in the industry as a whole, but I could be wrong about that. I’m used to being in work environments full of men, and it’s good, and if I say “Well, as a chick this is what I think,” they kind of have to take my word for it. But I don’t play that card too often.
They’re not being totally mean or abusive and it’s not a hostile work environment?
SG: Oh, no, no, no. In fact, its really raunchy, slightly pornographic room and I like it that way. We’re pretty immature and I mean, we have Dean’s sense of humor in the room. I pretty much have the sense of humor of a twelve year old boy that’s why I work there.
Speaking of Dean, Sam’s arc essentially will be demon blood addiction, recovery, and coming to terms with that next season. What is Dean going to be working on in terms of next season?
SG: Well, he has to come to terms with, he has a lot of anger toward his brother for one thing. And, one interesting thing that we’re watching with Dean in the first and second episode is he has always been so about his family and so about his brother and we have put him in these situations where he is directly responsible for the well being of these groups of people and its like save them or go after your brother. One thing I love about what’s happening to Dean this season is we’re seeing him sort of man up and become a leader in this way that we’ve have never seen before and not because he doesn’t have it in him necessarily it’s because he hasn’t been in these situations before. Now it’s the apocalypse and there are many of these situations that are town wide, a town under siege or there will be many people hiding in the basement or something. You kind of see Dean at full maturity in a way that we haven’t had the opportunity to show before and it’s kind of like this flavor of Dean that we’re exploring, he’s uncomfortable with it and all Dean ever wants to do is grab the shotgun and go after his brother for as we know, every now and then, Sam gets kidnapped. (Laughter).
But now we’re putting him in situations where he can’t necessarily run off do that right away, and that’s what adulthood and responsibility is about. That’s one thing and whether or not he can even look Sam in the eye after what he’s done is also a big part of the first half of the season.
Can Sam take care of himself by now?
SG: I think whether or not he can he should have to. That’s always been my point of view about it and that was my point of view about it last season as well. That’s what he’s always wanted and that’s what he asked for and part of his perspective about going down the road what he did with Ruby and with wanting to take Lilith on his own which kind of manifested into drinking demon blood was, I’m a grownup and this is what I’m going to do and you don’t have to agree with my plan, but I’m going to do it. It’s classic sort of sibling tension stuff laid out. If you have a little brother or older brother you know that sometimes there’s a point in your life, we talk about that in the room.
(Everyone pauses to laugh at something goofy Misha is doing at the other table).
(My Question!) We know you’re really good at putting Sam through the ringer, I know I’ve covered this with you before. What more can you do to the boy after “When The Levee Breaks?”
SG: We have more to do with Sam, Sam and Dean. You know, there are limits to what you can do to their physical self I mean we’ve killed them and put them in Hell and that sort of thing, but psychological torture, there’s no end. I mean Supernatural our bread and butter is psychological torture of the Winchester boys I think. Yeah, and now we have Castiel on a fairly regular basis and he is present in the boy’s life enough that we see a little humanizing of him and when an angel becomes more emotional and more human that maybe become easier for psychological torture. There’s plenty of that to go around.
Have you had any problems with the apocalypse?
SG: It’s actually been surprisingly easy. Last season was so dark, it was suicidal in many places especially Sam went to this very very dark place but apocalypse has been surprisingly amusing. We are having a great time with it. We are going into the future, the horsemen have a sense of humor, Lucifer is a nice guy in many ways. I mean he’s dangerous, everything is dangerous, people are dying by the thousands, everyone on planet earth could die, but maybe its gallows humor, maybe the stakes are so high that, you know, even creatures so hugely powerful that they’ve never had to have a point of view before, like say The Trickster, would have to weigh in. You know god with a lower case g would have to weigh in and they’re funny. So, it’s going to be scary and gory and freaky and the melodrama between the boys are there but I actually think it’s a funnier season than last in many ways.
(I couldn’t make it out, but it concerns Lucifer)
SG: He’s definitely the big bad of the season. I would compare it to Lilith in that you saw her sometimes, you heard about her a lot, you met her minions, you met her right hand man. You might actually see Lucifer a little more than you saw Lilith. We have a great actor cast, Mark Pelligrino. I don’t think he wants to go back to Hell, I think that’s the last place he wants to go, so he’s walking the earth and causing trouble.
Any other characters coming back like Meg?
SG: Rufus.
Recurring characters that help come back with the fight, even if they’re no longer living.
SG: Um, Jessica, Sam’s girlfriend hass a role in an upcoming ep. We’re bring back all the hunters we can, Ellen and Jo are coming back for an episode and Rufus. We’ve just had this run of good luck where the actors were all available and they haven’t necessarily been at the time we’ve wanted them.
Henricksen?
SG: I love him.
With that they wisked her away, and we waited patiently for Misha to work his way over.
You’re getting some really good stuff, Alice! Keep it up …
This season sounds so good … That was a definite hint about the Trickster, wasn’t it … Lots of gallows humour and old faves living and dead … I can even get over the return of Spagetti-Limb Twit-Girl Jo! 😆
Still no mention of the zombie alligators though, I expect they didn’t want to spoil the surprise …
“whether or not he can even look Sam in the eye after what he’s done is also a big part of the first half of the season.”
Wow, I can tell already just from that one line that I won’t be watching this show anymore. And I really used to love it.
Thank you for sharing your reviews. Can’t wait for season 5 to start.
Another awesome bit from Sera. I really like that they don’t back down from things, Sam did really bad things and it’s good that he and Dean are going to work it out in a raw, natural and for the brothers (and the fans) it will be uncomfortable. Much as last season took Dean to a bad place, sure we saw him after the bad place and not in it, but the repercussions were devastating and we saw that and we saw how the brothers dealt with it, both good (Heaven and Hell) and bad (Sex and Violence) we’ll see the repercussions of Sam’s decisions/actions dealt with here.
I love it, both characters are heroes who are human, flawed and damaged and perfectly imperfect…awesome.
Thank you Alice for these bits from the Con, I love these, so spoilery 🙂 I cant’ wait (!!!) for Season 5!! And I can’t believe that we are a little over a month away 😀
there are videos her:
http://www.daemonstv.com/2009/07/27/supernatural-producers-talk-season-5-at-comic-con-2009/
Thanks so much Alice, you are amazing. This is brilliant and i love everything i heard. i know it is hard for some people to embrace the whole Dean being angry at Sam thing but i really do. Not because i think Sam was wrong, i still believe he was doing what he thought was right and best but in the end he was proven wrong and instead of trusting his brother, he trusted Ruby. Again, i know he had reasons for that and i know he wanted to trust everyone but if Dean wasn’t angry at how it all went down, it just wouldn’t seem real to me. I love them both but i am more of a Sam fan and i am really looking forward to watching him go through this…as well as Dean. I feel it is important and natural also. their bond is still there. If it wasn’t they wouldn’t be together again – or wanting to.
Can’t wait. Loved the whole interview.
Hi, Alice (and all!)
Regarding the video links…I saw the Jim Beaver one as well as part of the Misha Collins one on spoilertv (it’s the same video as the link here) and the Jim Beaver one is the same interview that Alice has transcribed for us…we even hear her lovely voice talking about Jim’s book, proceeds for A Dog’s Life, and a little nod to The Winchester Family Business…whee.
As for Kara and others, I totally agree regarding the Sam and Dean storyline. S3 was a lot of angry Sam at Dean for being selfish (which Dean was) in making that deal, and Sam’s anger at having been dealt the same horrific blow, emotional and mental, that Dean had been dealt when John made his deal.
Kripke has stated all along that the heartbeat of the story is about family and all the demons, now angels, and urban legends and everything else is merely backdrop to the emotional story of the Winchesters…it still is and it’s not that hard to see or feel either. For all to be solved simply because Sam apologized (I believe for not trusting or listening to Dean and that’s an appropriate apology much as Dean’s is/was — Zach messing it up notwithstanding — to Sam for telling him, in essence, to go to hell) they hug and all is happy-go-lucky would be close to criminal, certainly neglect and absolutely bad writing on the writers’ part.
Season 4 was huge in the distrust and ‘breaking’ of the brothers’ relationship, Season 5 will be the fallout of that and how they rebuild. Kripke has stated they will rebuild so he won’t cheap out by either having them sweep it all under the rug, nor will he cheap out by having them go their separate ways to never speak or think of the other again. This is awesome…I’m stoked!
What I can’t get with the Dean being angry at Sam is that Dean was all gung-ho about killing Lilith himself.
Well, whatever, I’ve decided to stop watching a show where one is the only righteous man and the other is a monster when they both basically have made similar mistakes. Only thing is that one has the wrong kind of blood. The metaphor is something out of an eugenics handbook. It’s gotten too juvenile for me to even be able to watch it for the pretteh.
The moral of this story has become scary in its black/white view of what is right. The gray.scale has vanished and I don’t get that people don’t see this, which in fact, is even scarier. I always thought educated people would pick up what we are being fed, but no. I suggest everybody that doesn’t see what is being said between the lines read Barry Glassner.
Thanks for posting these interviews, Alice! I’m thrilled vicariously through your first hand accounts and encounters with our beloved SPN people. It sounds like this next season is going to be as fantastic as season 4.
I’m a little confused with people’s radical interpretation of what they think season 5 will be about and their dissatisfation with it before so much as a minute has even aired.
Personally, don’t think the show has really portrayed one righteous and one as “a monster”. In my opinion, the show is all about the grey, not black and white. In a lot of cases last season, I empathized with both boys, though I may have disagreed with their approach to things.
Both brothers have to come to terms with themselves and each other; they’ve both done things that are questionable and sometimes, yes, outright wrong. Dean absolutely has felt guilty about “jump starting” the apocolypse and now Sam is able to see how manipulated he allowed himself to be by Ruby – no doubt his guilt is pretty high as well. All along, Dean has been afraid *for* Sam, not of him. Further, Dean isn’t mad at Sam about being “gung-ho about killing Lilith” – Dean was upset about the method Sam used, drugging himself with Ruby’s blood because he was afraid of the effect the blood was having on Sam (blood in this case being likened to a drug, not having to do with eugenics, which, to me, is a rather extreme interpretation of that particular plot point). With Sam and Dean, there is a lot of hurt that needs to be repaired in the relationship on both parts and I think that contributes to the statement Sera made about Dean not being able to look Sam in the eye – I didn’t take that to mean that Dean was angry at Sam but instead that the relationship has been drastically altered and both are ashamed of their own actions/words as well as hurt by things the other has said and done. Dean, as we know, is prone to guilt and self-blame. I agree completely with Elle2 that the road back to the brotherly/close-trusting relationship of seasons past is a long and rocky one.
That’s just my opinion on what we’ve heard so far about season five. 🙂 I’m looking forward to the next chapter of this increasingly fantastic story.
I think that TV Guide interview with Eric Kripke has a lot of people worried about where this show is going. I am very excited about the possibilities of Sam’s redemption, and I love that they are going with the idea that Sam became an addict. Good people become addicts all the time, and it is usually the result of some emotional trauma. That makes sense to me. Suggesting that everything that happened in the last season is the result of his pride and selfishness is shocking coming from the character’s creator. As a fan I would like to believe that the writers have at least thought about what brought Sam to this point, and that it is not just that he is a selfish person.
” As a fan I would love to believe that the writers have at least thought about what brought Sam to this point, and that is not just that he is a selfish person”
But as the writers are known to forget about Sam’s issues, something Kripke admitted when John died or drop his storries ie what happened to all Mary’s friends dying. Why would we think that they would come up with a more complicated answer.
I haven’t read all the posts here, but hope the impression I am getting with the ones I have read so far, is wrong. I hope the writers are not going to indicate Sam’s action was one of pride and selfishness. I see Sam as extremely hurt, and angry over Lilth taking Dean to hell, and being helpless to do anything about it. Hence, he started down a revengeful path against Lilth, and just couldn’t stop. While Sam may have felt he was ‘addict’, it was all in his mind. And he accepted it becasue of his depressed state. Dean was dealing with guilt and injuries from hell, and couldn’t be the ‘older’ brother that Sam needed.
In the season finale when Sam apologized, Dean’s look was no longer one of anger. At that point he was just concerned with getting his brother out of there.
Maybe I’m a hopeless romantic, but, while the brothers are worn and battered, I think their connection to each other is as strong as always.
Just my two cents worth.
I didn’t see a righteous man and a monster, just two desperate and flawed human beings trying to do the best they could under the circumstances.
When the dust settles they’ll sort it out but it won’t be a quick kiss and all’s better because that would be too stupid in the light of what’s gone before.
Seems to me it’s a bit precipitate getting all wound up about a few words in a interview … Why not wait and see how it turns out in the flesh?