'Supernatural meets Gossip Girl': Netflix's Guarding Stars is a 2000s CW fan's Christmas present
Sam Winchester and Blair Waldorf walk into a Montana Christmas. The trailer isn't selling a thriller — and that's the correct decision.
Netflix dropped the first trailer for Guarding Stars on October 14, ahead of a November 18 premiere. Leighton Meester plays Hannah Brooks, a professional bodyguard assigned to protect Jack Stapleton — Jared Padalecki as a Hollywood action star with a stalker problem — during a family Christmas in rural Montana. The cover story for his family: she's the girlfriend.
It's an adaptation of Katherine Center's bestseller The Bodyguard, directed by Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum from a script by Erin Cardillo and Richard Keith, with Andie MacDowell as the matriarch. Worth noting who's paying for the mistletoe: Padalecki produces with his wife Genevieve through their company, so the star is also the chief architect of his own rebrand.
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What the trailer is and isn't selling
Viewers who came expecting an action-adjacent thriller noticed the genre bait-and-switch immediately:
«I kept waiting for some amount of menace or danger to justify a highly skilled bodyguard and got... A Hallmark trailer.»
— a commenter on r/movies
That's an accurate read of the footage, and the counter-argument arrived in the same thread, from the audience this movie is actually for:
«True, but as a 2000s kid, this is the guy from supernatural falling in love with Blair Waldorf. This is a big day for the Superwholockers among us!»
— a commenter on r/movies
My position: the second commenter understands the product and the first one reviewed the wrong movie. Guarding Stars isn't selling a plot, it's selling a crossover 2000s CW fans never got — fifteen seasons of Sam Winchester meeting six seasons of Blair Waldorf under a Christmas tree — and nostalgia casting is an honest transaction as long as nobody pretends otherwise. Nobody here is pretending: Padalecki told People his favorite holiday movies are "the ones that leave me feeling good when they end," which is a man describing a Hallmark movie on purpose, with a Netflix budget.
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The one genuine surprise in the package
The action pedigree isn't entirely decorative — it just belongs to the other lead. Meester did the stunt prep:
"I learned how to flip a stunt person, ride a horse, and jump away from an explosion."
— Leighton Meester, via The Playlist
So the bodyguard flips people and the action star gets protected, which is the most promising joke in the premise. Come November 18, expect cozy over credible, exactly one explosion to jump away from, and a very specific generation explaining to their partners why this casting matters.
The action star of the two is Meester: she trained to flip stuntmen while Padalecki's character hides at his mom's house.