Uvalde school shooting hits home for Jensen Ackles: ‘It’s scary, and it doesn’t need to happen’
Jensen Ackles was in New Mexico filming the Western “Rust” when cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed on set. And now another tragedy closer to home – the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas – has deeply affected the actor.
As a performer who loves action and adventure, Ackles, 44, has wielded firearms onscreen – most recently as demon-hunting Dean Winchester on CW’s long-running show “Supernatural” and in his newest gig, as superhero Soldier Boy on Season 3 of “The Boys” (streaming Friday on Amazon Prime). And he understands that “tragedies happen constantly.”
But what occurred last week in Uvalde – where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school – “shook me more as a dad than what happened right before my eyes, because that was premeditated. And what happened on ‘Rust’ was an accident,” says the Texas native, who lives in Austin with his family (wife Danneel, 9-year-old daughter Justice and 5-year-old twins Arrow and Zeppelin).
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Last year, Ackles was working on “Rust” with actor/producer Alec Baldwin when, during a rehearsal, Baldwin discharged a replica Colt that killed 42-year-old Hutchins and injured director Joel Souza. The incident immediately shuttered production on the film and sparked a series of lawsuits. In April, New Mexico’s Occupational Health and Safety Bureau issued a report blasting “Rust” producers for “plain indifference” and noted they “willfully violated” known industry safety protocols in imposing a nearly $137,000 fine for firearms safety failures.
“You can chalk it up to negligence or try to point a finger at anybody,” Ackles tells USA TODAY. “At the end of the day, it was a horrible, horrible accident that ended with a life. Unfortunately, those do happen all the time around the world everywhere. You don’t normally witness them like I did, and it’s certainly shocking and jarring. It makes you value life even more than you had.”
In a Hollywood Reporter interview last month, “Rust” producer Anjul Nigam said he expects to finish the film after an investigation into the shooting is completed, but “I’d be pretty shocked if that happened,” Ackles says. “Time has passed now (and) everybody’s kind of moved on, which is very unfortunate because I would’ve loved for the world to see what Halyna was doing.
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“We were only about a week and a half away from being done with that film, so there was a lot of footage in the can and she was doing something really exceptional,” he says. “She was an incredible talent, and I wish there was some way to get it out there to the masses, but I don’t know that that’s possible.”