Jensen Ackles Is Perfect for Rules of Prey

Jensen Ackles Is Perfect for Rules of Prey

“A rooftop billboard cast a flickering blue light through the studio windows…” One needs only to read a little further to feel a sense of foreboding. To know the killer’s fervent longing, tinged with an ungodly thrill. This is the opening passage of Rules of Prey. The passage that started it all.

Published in 1989, Rules of Prey introduced readers to John Sandford’s Minneapolis police detective Lucas Davenport and began a crime-thriller series that has exhilarated readers for more than three decades.

MGM+ has officially greenlit an eight-episode adaptation of Rules of Prey, with Jensen Ackles set to star as Davenport.

Suddenly I’m much more interested in meeting Mr. Davenport.

Getting Started

Created for television by Bruce Terris, who will also serve as showrunner and executive producer, Rules of Prey is based on the first novel in Sandford’s long-running Prey series. Daniel Sackheim will direct the pilot and second episode and serve as an executive producer with John Sandford himself along for the ride as co-producer. MGM Television and Take 5 Productions will produce the series, which is already underway in Toronto.

Those are the particulars. It’s what the studio shared with us about Lucas Davenport that has me considerably more intrigued. Here is an excerpt from the MGM+ press release for Rules of Prey: “Rules of Prey follows Lucas Davenport, formerly a detective in the Minneapolis Police Department, drawn out of seclusion back into law enforcement to investigate a series of confounding murders designed to send a message specifically to him. When an ingenious serial killer begins murdering Minneapolis citizens, Davenport, a brilliant polymath and unconventional investigator, takes the case, sparking an intense psychological duel with an equally intelligent adversary. As Davenport deciphers the killer’s twisted moral code and personal vendetta, he must match wits with a predator operating by his own rules of justice, risking everything to stop a killer who sees their conflict as the ultimate game.”

So Who is This Davenport Guy?

I haven’t met Lucas Davenport yet and in the interest of full transparency those introductions won’t take place until Amazon shows up with my copy of Rules of Prey. As they speed ever closer, I’m intrigued to not only become familiar with this character, but with an entire series of crime-thriller novels that somehow managed to escape me for more than three decades.

I sheepishly tip my hat in apology to John Sandford for being so grievously late to the party.

Sandford readily admits that real cops behaving like Lucas Davenport could find themselves on the business end of a human resources nightmare, or worst-case scenario, the inside of a jail cell. Procedural accuracy was never entirely the point. Sandford drew upon his years as a newspaper reporter covering real cops and real crimes and deliberately created a character who was larger than life.

Naturally, my curiosity got the better of me while I’ve been waiting, so I did some cursory research into Davenport through Sandford’s own website. And what I’ve discovered so far is a deeply interesting set of contradictions.

Both Sandford’s description of his creation and MGM+’s description of its television incarnation, point to a man who, on the one hand is devoted to justice, but by the other, isn’t necessarily constrained by rules. There’s something undeniably appealing about a character who lives in the grey. Someone whose moral compass doesn’t always point in the direction we’d expect, and yet, as we question his methods, we find ourselves rooting for him, nonetheless. Our very own morally complicated protagonist.

He’s a sophisticated and wealthy gentleman in his own right and yet, he’s dangerous. Davenport wears beautiful clothes, drives a Porsche, has accumulated wealth designing computer games and yet Sandford conceived this character as a tough, intimidating cop. A polished exterior in stark juxtaposition with a capacity for violence.

It gets even better. Davenport is intelligent. He’s an independent thinker who, through his own choice of profession, is forced to operate within an institutional hierarchy. He is a police lieutenant, but he’s also the sole member of his department’s Office of Special Intelligence. At best, he prefers working alone and at the very least, alongside the homicide team rather than entrenched within it. He’s part of the system without comfortably fitting in. I love this already. It certainly sounds like a character for whom going rogue is never entirely off the table.

Lastly, and perhaps my favorite character trait I’ve sussed out about Davenport, he’s at that delicious intersection between intellect and physical threat. He approaches a serial killer’s crimes as an intellectual contest, recognizing the need to intimately understand his opponent. But alongside his need to outsmart his prey, there lives the physical; the strength, the endurance, the fortitude and the courage required to bring a killer to justice.

Why Jensen Ackles?

We don’t know the details yet about what Bruce Terris has in store for this incarnation of Lucas Davenport, but if there’s one thing I can say with the depth, breadth and certainty of someone who has covered Jensen Ackles’ career for some years now, it’s this: they’ve chosen the perfect man for the job.

My cursory introduction to the character of Lucas Davenport has revealed what demands will be made of any actor slipping into this persona, and these demands are things Ackles does exceptionally well.

He Knows His Way Around the Grey

Let’s start with what may be the most obvious. Jensen Ackles hasn’t just stacked his resume portraying characters who don’t fit comfortably into neat little boxes, he wrote the handbook on what it means to live in the grey.

Dean Winchester was heroic without ever being pristine. He possessed both cutting sarcasm and playful wit. He could be selfless and reckless, compassionate and violent, enormously loving and absolutely terrifying when circumstance demanded it. He wore loyalty like a second skin.

Soldier Boy took moral ambiguity into considerably darker territory, asking Ackles to find the humanity buried beneath the swagger, brutality and deeply ingrained toxicity of a man who could be both victim and perpetrator. Soldier Boy is a character we should hate. Jensen Ackles somehow made many of us love that man despite his considerable flaws. Remarkable portrayal.

More recently, Countdown’s Mark Meachum was another maverick; a cop willing to buck protocol, conceal important truths from his colleagues and make decisions according to a deeply personal sense of purpose.

Three very different men. Three different characters.

That’s really important because it isn’t the characteristics themselves that make Ackles particularly suited to Davenport. It’s his ability to make contradictions coexist without asking the audience to choose between them. He doesn’t need us to believe his character is entirely right. He needs us to understand why the character believes he is.

And for a man like Lucas Davenport who is devoted to justice while apparently willing to cross the boundaries of the law to achieve it, that distinction could prove invaluable.

He Shows The Audience

Calling Davenport intelligent may actually be underselling him. MGM+ describes him as a “brilliant polymath.” A polymath isn’t simply someone who’s exceptionally intelligent, but someone whose knowledge and abilities span multiple fields or disciplines. That kind of wide-ranging intellect can bring with it an unusual ability to make connections, drawing on information from seemingly unrelated places and applying it to the problem at hand.

That’s a wonderful thing to put into a character description. It’s considerably harder to put it on screen. You can give an actor clever dialogue. You can surround him with characters who repeatedly tell us how brilliant he is. But eventually the actor has to make us believe it.

One of Ackles’ greatest strengths has always been the amount of information he can convey without ever saying a single word. I’ve written before about the economy of his choices. The flicker of an eye. A tightening of his voice. The set of his shoulders. A controlled breath. The almost imperceptible moment when something registers behind his eyes. His expressions convey information.

It’s one of those skills that becomes easy to take for granted after watching someone do it consistently for years, but it’s remarkably important here. Rules of Prey isn’t simply setting Davenport against someone he needs to catch. It’s setting him against someone he needs to understand. This is an intellectual contest.

We’re going to need to see Davenport observe, calculate, reconsider, anticipate and, eventually, outthink a man who considers murder part of an elaborate game. Ackles doesn’t need dialogue to tell us the wheels are turning. He can let us watch them turn.

Ackles always takes the audience on a ride with him and damn, I’m all-in on this one!

Some Actors Learn to Fight. Jensen Ackles Learned to Move

I’ve said this before and I’m going to say it again because Lucas Davenport gives me an awfully good reason to. Some actors learn to fight. Jensen Ackles learned to move. And there’s a big difference.

Ackles’ physicality has always felt like an extension of character rather than choreography. His movements are economical, fluid and deliberate. Whether he’s throwing a punch, handling a weapon or simply standing perfectly still with a loaded stare, there is intention behind what his body is doing.

We saw it throughout Supernatural. Soldier Boy added brute force and frightening physical dominance. Countdown gave Ackles an opportunity to bring years of stunt work, weapons handling and physical training into the more grounded world of law enforcement.

But the thing I’ve always found most compelling isn’t whether Ackles can convincingly win a fight. It’s that the performance doesn’t stop when the fighting starts. If Davenport is going to exist at that intersection between formidable intellect and physical threat, the actor playing him needs to sell both sides of that equation.

Ackles can.

Beneath the Surface

This may be the quality I’m most excited to see Ackles bring to Davenport, because it’s arguably where some of his finest work lives. Ackles understands the mask. Dean Winchester wore one for years. Soldier Boy certainly wore one. Mark Meachum spent much of Countdown desperately trying to keep one in place.

And Ackles has a remarkable ability to let us see what’s underneath without necessarily allowing the other characters in the room to see it too.

I’ve watched him do it with fear, grief, shame, rage, vulnerability and pain. Sometimes it’s there for only a second. The eyes change. The jaw tightens. The bravado slips. Then the wall goes straight back up.

It’s a delicate thing to pull off because overplay it and the mask ceases to exist. Underplay it and the audience misses what’s underneath. Ackles has become extraordinarily good at living somewhere between the two.

I don’t yet know what Lucas Davenport hides or what wounds he carries. I also don’t know what Sandford has waiting for me inside those pages, or which of them Bruce Terris intends to explore in this adaptation. But if there’s something happening underneath that polished, intelligent, intimidating exterior, you’ve got the leading man who will find the nuance.

Presence

There are acting skills that can be studied, practiced and refined. And then there’s that indefinable thing that happens when someone walks onto a screen and your eyes simply go to them. It’s presence.

Ackles has it. In spades.

Not because he needs to dominate every scene. Quite the opposite. Some of his most effective work comes from stillness. He can relinquish the dialogue, allow another actor to own the moment and remain completely present within it. That’s leading-man territory.

And apparently MGM+ agrees. In announcing the series, Michael Wright, global head of MGM+, specifically cited Ackles’ “classic leading man charisma” when talking about what he brings to Rules of Prey. That particular choice of words struck me. Because decades before Jensen Ackles was handed the role, John Sandford explained what he had in mind when he created Lucas Davenport.

“I wanted him to be a star. I wanted him to be different.”

Well, Mr. Sandford…

They found you a star.

Links and Source Material

For anyone who wishes to follow the links… knock your socks off! These are listed in no particular order.

• Amazon MGM+ Press Release
• John Sandford Rules of Prey / Lucas Davenport background and Author Commentary
• John Sandford The Official Website
• Jensen Ackles – IMDb Profile
• Bruce Terris – IMDb Profile
• Daniel Sackheim – IMDb Profile
• John Sandford – IMDb Profile
• Deadline: Jensen Ackles to Star in Rules of Prey at MGM+
• Variety: Jensen Ackles to Star in Rules of Prey
• Photo compilation: John Sandford-Courtesy mprnew.org / Bruce Terris-Courtesy IMBd / Daniel Sackheim-IMDb
• All Jensen Ackles photos Courtesy Prime Video