Jensen Ackles

Jensen Ackles is an American actor and director whose two-decade career has been most-defined by his fifteen-season role as Dean Winchester on The CW supernatural drama Supernatural (2005–2020). He was born Jensen Ross Ackles on March 1, 1978, in Dallas, Texas. His father Alan Roger Ackles was an actor, and Jensen started professional modeling work as a young child before pivoting to acting in his late teens.

His TV career through the late 1990s and early 2000s included multiple soap-opera and prime-time roles before joining the original Smallville (2004–2005) cast as Jason Teague — a role that brought him to the attention of producer Eric Kripke. Kripke cast Ackles as Dean Winchester, the older of two brothers who travel across the United States hunting supernatural creatures, on The WB's (later The CW's) Supernatural when the show launched in September 2005.

The Supernatural-era run was unusual for both its 15-season longevity and its continuous fan engagement. The show was the longest-running American sci-fi/fantasy series in television history when it concluded in November 2020 across 327 episodes. Ackles's portrayal of Dean — the older brother whose fierce loyalty and tightly-wound emotional life increasingly anchored the show's emotional core — earned him a substantial international fan following and made him one of the most-recognizable American genre-TV faces of the 2010s.

His subsequent post-Supernatural work has included Amazon Prime's The Boys (2022, season 3, where he played the antihero "Soldier Boy" — a character he reportedly campaigned for years for), and the 2024 Marvel Animation series Lanterns. He has directed multiple episodes of Supernatural and several other CW productions. He has been married to actress Danneel Harris (Ackles) since 2010, and the couple has three children.

His name Jensen is from the Danish-Norwegian patronymic surname meaning "son of Jens" — Jens being the Scandinavian short form of Johannes (the Latin/German form of John). Jensen has been continuously climbing in American naming since the 2000s and currently sits in the US top 200 boys' names — partly anchored by Ackles's continuous Supernatural-era visibility.