Misha Collins

The Intern Who Didn't Want to Be a Politician

Dmitri Tippens Krushnic spent his youth far from the spotlight of Los Angeles. He studied Social Theory at the University of Chicago and ended up working as a White House intern during the Bill Clinton administration. That experience in Washington taught him that real power wasn't in the offices but in communication.

And then he decided to change his name and his life. He adopted the surname Collins from his great-grandmother and began looking for work on small film sets in the late nineties. He made a brief appearance in the movie Girl, Interrupted in 1999 and had a role lasting only a few seconds in Liberty Heights that same year.

Not the usual path for a star.

But his angular build and unsettling stare opened doors for him on television at the time. He worked on Charmed and 24, where he played a Serbian villain during the first season in 2002. In those years, Collins was a reliable supporting actor who filled gaps in procedural dramas while founding software companies to pay the bills.

The Accident That Lasted Twelve Years

In 2008, he auditioned for a supporting role in the fourth season of Supernatural. The producers were looking for an angel named Castiel who would only appear in three episodes to rescue the lead from hell. Collins decided to give him an extremely deep, gravelly voice, inspired by the way his own father spoke, to convey a supernatural authority.

The gamble paid off.

The character connected with the audience so aggressively that the writers were forced to rewrite the show's entire storyline. What was supposed to be a three-week job turned into a twelve-year gig. Collins saw the fan phenomenon before anyone else and used social media to build a community that spilled far beyond the limits of the CW's fiction.

During filming of the series in Vancouver, he spent much of his free time coordinating projects outside of acting. In 2009, he co-founded Random Acts, a nonprofit organization, and organized the world's largest scavenger hunt, known as GISHWHES. He set several Guinness World Records for civic participation while still wearing his character's trench coat every week.

Verses and Declining Prosecutors

When Supernatural ended in 2020 after fifteen seasons, the actor sought out projects that would take him away from pure fantasy. In 2021, he published a book of poetry titled Some Things I Still Can’t Tell You. The book hit the bestseller lists in the United States and revealed a vulnerable side that his fans had never seen before.

And he returned to television in grand style.

In 2023, he took on the challenge of playing Harvey Dent in the series Gotham Knights. Filming took place in Atlanta, and Collins had to face the physical transformation of a prosecutor who ends up becoming the villain Two-Face. It was an ambitious project that explored the moral fall of a just man in a lawless city.

The CW announced the cancellation of Gotham Knights in June 2023 after the airing of its only season of thirteen episodes. The series' final episode aired on June 27, 2023, under the title Night of the Owls. After production wrapped, Collins focused on promoting his fiction podcast Bridgewater, whose second season finished airing early that same year.