Jared Padalecki: How locked-up kids detained at the U.S.-Mexico border inspired Walker

Deadline

The Walker, Texas Ranger reboot is called Walker because it's about the entire Walker family, and not revolving around one fisticuffs guy. Padalecki, an executive producer on Walker, helped the other producers craft a story inspired by the story of immigrant kids that made national news during the Trump era. "A few years back when there were a lot of humans being coming from South of the American border into America, our society seemed to want to put people in cages and separate families; I read a story about a law enforcement agent who couldn’t bring themselves to put a three-year old in a cage and take them away from their parents," said Padalecki at a virtual panel this morning. "They said something along the lines of that they had a three-year old, they couldn’t bring themselves to do it. And that empathy and that emotion struck me as something as the evitable stuck in between a rock and a hard place, but you’re bound by duty, but you still have a moral code and you see people as human beings, not perpetrators or heroes. And so we started talking about how interesting it would be to see that story told. Where someone is a proud government worker for law enforcement, and still thinks to themselves that there might be a better way; these laws are old and not nuanced. Anna and I talk about the edge of the coin. They say that there’s two sides to a coin, but there’s also a third side of the coin, the edge. So where is that where someone is bound by their duty and by their sense of safety, and helping others, but also a family man and their friends and where does that meet." Padalecki adds: "We talked about wanting to pose questions instead of proselytize our beliefs and forces answers down our viewers’ throats." In a separate interview with Variety, Padalecki says: “We don’t want the audience to ever know whether Walker is quote conservative or quote liberal, or quote Republican or quote Democrat. This version of Walker, we play with the gray area: This is not a show about a martial artist kicking minorities in the face; this is a show about a legit Texan saying, ‘Hey, I need to hear the whole story before I make a decision.’ So this version is less about what goes through somebody’s fists and feet, and more about what goes through somebody’s head and heart.”