Dream Guy: An Exclusive Interview with Jim Beaver and Supernatural's Dream a Little Dream

Warner Brothers hit series Supernatural has a brand new season three episode 'Dream a Little Dream' airing this Thursday, February 7th at 9PM EST on the CW Network and I caught up with actor Jim Beaver who plays the part of recurring character Bobby Singer, a supernatural hunter, to talk to him about his role in the episode and his take on why Bobby Singer has touched such a responsive chord in the fans of the series.

Supernatural, now in its third season, is the hit CW Network/Warner Bros. series which stars the highly talented Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles as Sam and Dean Winchester, two hot looking, heroic brothers running around in a cool muscle car carrying a trunk full of weapons designed to hunt down and do battle with things that go bump in the night.

The character of Bobby Singer was first introduced to Supernatural viewers in the season one episode 'Devil's Trap and Jim Beaver points out that at this point, we really didn't know who Bobby Singer really was beyond his having been a friend of Sam and Dean's father, John Winchester (played by Jeffery Dean Morgan). We asked Beaver what his thoughts were about the evolution of his character and how Bobby has changed since that first appearance.

"In Devil's Trap, he [Bobby] was mainly there to provide a little perspective for the boys, and I'm not sure anyone expected him to be back after that episode," Beaver says of the origins of his character. "Since then, what's changed is that the audience knows Bobby Singer now. They've had tidbits, pretty small tidbits, of his history and relationships sprinkled in, but what has really revealed Bobby to the audience is his attitude. Rather than merely being a foil for Sam and Dean, he has thoughts and ideas and plans of his own and he has opinions about the brothers and their plans and ideas."

Beaver says that he feels the most prominent of these things is the awareness that grew in Season 2 that Bobby was discovering what it was like to have family, and that he was growing to realize that he now has family in these two brothers. "My favorite revelation thus far," Beaver tells us, "isn't really plot-related. It's the moment when we see just how much he cares for the boys, when he takes Dean to task for the deal he made to save Sam."

It appears that on the whole, Supernatural viewers have responded very favorably to the idea of the character of Bobby Singer stepping into the role of surrogate father figure to Sam and Dean Winchester with the on screen chemistry between Beaver, Ackles and Padalecki creating a strong working dynamic among their characters. I asked Jim Beaver if he knew if this role that Bobby was now playing in the lives of Sam and Dean Winchester was something that the creators and writers of the show had planned all along.

"I don't know whether Eric and his staff had any special plans for Bobby at the beginning. I've never asked them. Maybe they did," Beaver tells us quite candidly. "But my sense is that it was an evolving thing. Perhaps it grew out of the scheduling conflicts that Jeffrey Dean Morgan was having, which I suspect had something to do with his character's departure from the show, and thus Eric felt the need to fill the void left by the death of John. Dramatically, it's good to have the boys not have to figure everything out, to sometimes have to turn somewhere outside themselves either for advice or support. It allows more story variations."

I asked Jim Beaver if he was surprised by these turn of events and that Bobby had become this 'father figure' for the boys, especially towards Dean.

"Ever since that great scene in the wrecking yard when Bobby asks Dean why he cares so little for himself, it's been clear that their relationship has been growing in this direction, that despite the fact that Sam and Dean are now men and are on their own, they still need and want guidance from a loving, sympathetic, and competent figure like Bobby. So it doesn't surprise me at all that that element is now being explored further. I can't
say I necessarily expected it, but I wasn't surprised."

Now that he had played this character on a fairly recurring basis and has come to 'know' Bobby Singer better, I asked Jim Beaver if the writers of Supernatural allowed him some input into the character once he would get the script for his next appearance on the show. Beaver had some interesting things to say on this topic that proved to be a very insightful look into this talented actor's views on bringing any character to life.

"It's hard to say whether I've been allowed to have input into Bobby's character, because I really haven't tried to have any input, at least not overtly," Beaver explains. "I don't generally make suggestions or say 'I don't think Bobby would say this' or 'Here's what I think he should do instead.' My job is not to create Bobby but to interpret him, to take what the writers have written and play it in such a way that the writers' ideas are demonstrated in their fullness."

Beaver says tells us that this process, at least on a series, is always symbiotic, that the writers create a character, hire someone to play it, and then watch what the actor brings to the part. He goes on to elaborate the point by explaining that almost always on a show like Supernatural that gets a chance to stick around for a bit, elements of who the actor is and what his personality brings to the character will slowly get incorporated into the character.

"The producers see what an actor does well, or they notice what got a good response from the fans, and they revisit those things and expand upon them. So in that sense, I have a lot of input into Bobby. If you look at any long-running series, I think you'll see that most of the characters are a little different in later episodes than they were at the very
beginning." Beaver says that this is because of the writer-actor collaboration that goes on and even though the actor may never have actually suggested a change they do effect changes by this process.

That said, Beaver does admit that he did once pass along something to the writers of Supernatural. "I did one time suggest a storyline that would involve Bobby, one in which the boys find Bobby romantically involved with a demon, only he doesn't know it.
But it was a casual suggestion, and whether anyone even noticed I suggested it
is a mystery to me," he says with laugh.

One thing that isn't quite so mysterious to Jim Beaver, but did surprise him a bit is how enthusiastically and warmly the fans and viewers of Supernatural have embraced the character of Bobby Singer and an 'old guy' and he tells us that there are a couple reasons for his surprise at the how the fans and viewers have taken to him and to his character of Bobby Singer.

"One is that I've been acting a long time and had sort of gotten used to being noticed and fairly well-known within the industry, among the directors and casting directors and actors, but never particularly noticed (as far as I know) by people outside the entertainment business. Part of that is that I seem to be pretty good at disappearing into a character, so that often people who met me were surprised to find I was the same guy they'd seen in this movie or that show. Industry folk seemed to know who I was, but I felt pretty invisible to the world at large."

"Secondly, Supernatural is and always will be a show about two brothers - two hunky brothers - and it always seemed to me that people tuned in to see a couple of good-looking youngsters have adventures. It didn't seem a likely place for a comparatively
crusty old guy like me to strike a chord. You know, among an awful lot of young people, anyone over 35 might as well be 1,035! You know, old and invisible. So it's been an enormously rewarding surprise to find that Supernatural fans like Bobby and seem to welcome his appearances. And the kindnesses of the fans I've encountered have been really touching."

Fans and viewers are going to get another opportunity to embrace the character of Bobby Singer in upcoming episode 'Dream a Little Dream' and to find out a little bit more about Bobby and to see a different side of the character.

Beaver says that the biggest challenge in shooting Dream a Little Dream for him was mostly a physical one.

"There was a lot of screaming and yelling that Bobby had to do, and I ended up doing a lot of it at the end of a long day, so my voice was really ragged by the time we finished. I thought if I had to scream "Help me!" in that closet one more time, I was going to
cough my larynx out onto the floor. And then, after all that, I ended up
having to redo the scream at the end of a looping session a couple of months
later because the camera movement could be heard in the original take."

However, according to Beaver, not all the physical challenges of filming an episode of Supernatural were unpleasant ones. "Probably the most fun was when a beautiful stuntwoman in a negligee (Loren Gibson) knocked me down, straddled me, and began beating me senseless. Hey, if that's what it takes to get a girl to jump on me, I'm game!"

I asked Jim Beaver that since this episode is about exploring dreams and nightmares, was there anything the writers came up for Bobby's dreams and nightmares that surprised him in regards to the character, maybe something he or fans didn't even expect to be a part of Bobby Singer's psychological make up?

"Dream a Little Dream is the first time we see Bobby really, genuinely scared, terrified. That's pretty unnerving for the boys and probably for the fans, too. While it was a little
disconcerting to me at first (none of us gets into acting because we want to play the scared guy - we all want to be John Wayne, the guy who saves the scared guy), it was great to get to play another facet, to explore a little more. Sometimes in a TV series, it's easy to leave the characters static, never changing, always reliable, always doing what's
expected. One of the things I like about Supernatural is that it doesn't settle for that."

Viewers and fans can agree with Jim Beaver that Supernatural is not a series to stay static and season three is prime example of that with the addition of two new recurring female characters added to the mix in the form of Katie Cassidy as Ruby and Lauren Cohan as Bela. Jim Beaver got his first chance to work with new cast member Katie Cassidy in the season three episode, Sin City.

"Katie's a doll, a really nice girl with a sparkling personality. The scene where I shot her character of Ruby and then she helps me with the Colt was, I believe, the first time I worked with her. I don't think I handled our first meeting well," Beaver says and then explains that when he first saw Katie Cassidy, she was having a smoke outside her trailer.

"Without an actual introduction, I began to chided her a bit, telling her about my wife Cecily's death from lung cancer not long ago and how I hated to think of someone Katie's age courting danger in that way. It wasn't a stupid conversation to have, but it was a stupid first conversation to have, coming up and telling someone how I think she should live her life when I haven't really even met her yet. But it was well-intended, and she was sweet about it."

"A few minutes later I was shooting her with the Colt. That was spooky because, even though there are always a great many safety measures taken on a set, it's always a little uncomfortable for me having to shoot at someone, or to be shot at by someone, in a show."

Jim Beaver explains that he was once was seriously wounded by a blank years ago, and that he knows that others such as John Eric Hexum and Brandon Lee have died from them. "So I have a quite healthy respect for guns and their safe use, even guns loaded with blanks," Beaver says. "We were very careful, but it's an interesting day when you tell someone she shouldn't smoke so she can live longer and then you point a gun at her and fire it!"

Since Dream a Little Dream is about dreams and nightmares, I finished off the interview by asking Jim Beaver if he would be amenable to telling us what his worst nightmare is.

"I remember my dreams extremely rarely, and haven't had what I would call a true nightmare in many years," Beaver explained and told us that the closest he could come to remembering a nightmare to share is what's famously known as the actor's nightmare, which lots of actors apparently have.

"It's the one where you have to do a play and the curtain's getting ready to go up but you haven't had time to learn your lines and you can't find your costume and the door to the dressing room is locked and you're going to miss your entrance and even if you make your entrance on time, you're going to be naked and not know your lines. Knowing what that dream is, knowing that probably every actor from Laurence Olivier all the way back to Richard Burbage in Shakespeare's time has had it, actually makes it a sort of fun nightmare. I've had it many times."

With the current writer's strike effecting production all over the entertainment industry, Jim Beaver says that he doesn't have any other acting projects on the horizon (though he does have another upcoming appearance in Supernatural as Bobby Singer) but that he recently sold a memoir of the year following his wife's cancer diagnosis to Putnam.

"It's called Life's That Way, and we expect it to come out in early 2009."

Meanwhile Supernatural viewers can catch Jim Beaver's next outing as Bobby Singer in the upcoming episode Dream a Little Dream airing this Thursday, February 7th at 9PM EST on the CW Network. Fans can also have a chance to see Jim Beaver in person this coming April at the upcoming EyeCon convention in Orlando, Florida where he will be appearing with fellow Supernatural stars Jared Padalecki, Sandra McCoy, Alona Tal and Chad Lindberg.