The CW’s walker is swapping the martial arts kicks that have become synonymous with Chuck Norris’ original series for familiar feelings.
Debuting this Thursday at 8 / 7c, the reboot doesn’t just focus on your starting character (or karate moves). Instead, it is “about the Walker family and families that are not simply blood,” said star Jared Padalecki during a recent panel for the series. When the show begins, the newly widowed Cordell Walker is struggling to reconnect with his children after returning from a long secret mission.
Of course, Padalecki knows something about family ties, having just come out of a 15-season run in the Supernatural, which included “Family doesn’t end in blood” among its many trademark slogans. Despite these similarities and more – Cordell also shares a complex relationship with his younger brother Liam (played by Little liars‘Keegan Allen), much like Padalecki’s Supernatural alter ego did with big brother Dean – the two characters couldn’t be further apart, making the transition from Winchester to Walker easier for Padalecki.
“This version of Walker is so crystal clear and different from Sam Winchester that I would have to try hard to bleed the two together,” said Padalecki. “It was a lot of work, but it was a continuous change from 15 years onwards Supernatural like Sam Winchester for the next 15 years walker like Cordell Walker. “
The new iteration of Walker, Texas Ranger intends to explore the complexities of today’s world when it comes to politics, race and law. After reading a story about “a law enforcement officer who simply couldn’t convince himself to put a three-year-old child in the cage and take him away from his parents … that empathy and that emotion impressed me,” Padalecki shared. “[You’re] caught between the inevitable rock and a difficult place where you are subject to duty, but still have a moral code and see people as human beings, not as perpetrators or heroes. Then we started talking about how interesting it would be to see this story told, where someone who is a proud government official for law enforcement still thinks to himself that there could be a better way. “
“[Executive producer] Anna [Fricke] and I talk a lot about the edge of the coin, ”continued Padalecki. “They always say that there are two sides to a coin – heads or tails – but there is also a third margin for the coin.”
For The 100 veterinarian Lindsey Morgan, who plays Walker’s new partner (and one of the first women in the history of the Texas Rangers) Micki Ramirez, starring as a woman of color law in a world Black Lives Matter “became that [unexpected] blessing, because suddenly a law enforcement program in a very divided state like Texas means a lot more now in our world today than it would have before 2020, ”Morgan shared. “Therefore, just because of my position and the character I play, a major obstacle and learning challenge I face daily is: ‘Where do I fit as a Mexican woman on a Caucasian majority law enforcement team in a state, that is , for his story he was mostly conservative and didn’t care much about marginalized communities and immigrants? ‘And so I love that my character is placed in these two worlds and these two types of warrior communities, but hoping to be a link and that we can tell a story of tolerance and a story from two perspectives. “
According to this thought, “our walker it is not simply a history of law enforcement, ”emphasized Padalecki. “Ours is more of a story of human experience”, exploring “the question of race and the question of how minorities are treated. Because let’s be honest, it is not a law enforcement problem. It’s in politics, it’s in industry, it’s in school. And so we are trying to deal with these issues that are very real in 2020 and 2021 ”.