‘Countdown’ creator Derek Haas, star Jensen Ackles on opening cameo

This article contains spoilers from the premiere of Countdown.

Countdown didn’t waste any time shocking audiences. Instead of kicking things off with a scene involving any of the main cast — Jensen Ackles, Eric Dane, etc. — the series surprised fans by opening on an actor that no one knew was part of the show: Milo Ventimiglia. 

The This Is Us star started the series off with an intense chase scene that ended in his character’s death. “We purposefully left him out of all the ads and the promo,” series creator Derek Haas tells Entertainment Weekly. “And then he was great.” 

Although the series didn’t always start with a cameo — they originally shot the sequence with a different actor — once they realized they wanted to throw in that twist, Ventimiglia was an obvious choice. “Derek came to me and threw out a couple of names and Milo was one of them, and I was like, ‘Oh yeah, get Milo,'” series star Ackles says. 

“I felt like he was doing us a favor,” Haas says, sharing his surprise that Ventimiglia was willing to take the role. “I didn’t know him, but I was delighted when he said he wanted to meet about it and I thought, ‘There’s no way he’s going to do this.’ And then he was like, ‘I think this would be really cool.’ I don’t think he’s ever done something like that before.”

The end result is an intense action sequence that takes place across Los Angeles. “I spoke to him after I saw it,” Ackles continues. “I was like, ‘Sequence looks amazing, you crushed it, you’ve got to be sore, that was a lot of running,” he says with a laugh. “We’re not as young as we used to be.”

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For Haas, he’s hoping that the sequence hooks viewers into the rest of the story, as Dane’s Nathan Blythe puts together an elite task force to find Ventimiglia’s character’s killer. But Haas already knows it worked for one person. “My mom’s mad at me: ‘How could you kill Jack from This Is Us?'”

The first three episodes of Countdown are streaming now on Prime Video, with new episodes dropping every Wednesday.