From “Fringe” to cringe.
Joshua Jackson, whose dad abandoned him and his family when he was a child, had an awkward reply to a reporter who asked him the “best piece of advice” his dad ever gave him.
“Dawson’s Creek” actor reacted to the question by bursting into laughter before saying, “My father abandoned my family.”
“You know what?” he continued, getting more serious. “The best piece of advice my father accidentally gave me in his absence is to be a good and present father.”
The internet was split in the comments between shock that Jackson, 47, was asked that question and their admiration for his heartfelt answer.
“[A]re you out of your mind asking [J]oshua such a question….,” one person wrote of interviewer Isaac Hindin-Miller. Another chimed in, “Damn Joshua 😢😢 but I love what he said in the end! 🙌.”
The moment was featured in Hindin-Miller’s roundup from the premiere of “Brunello: The Gracious Visionary” at New York City’s Lincoln Center on Tuesday. It also featured celebrities like Martha Stewart, Shonda Rhimes and Ryan Seacrest responding to the same prompt.
Elsewhere at the documentary premiere, Jackson reunited with his “Dawson’s Creek” co-star Katie Holmes.
The former castmates — who also briefly dated in real life in the late ’90s — posed together on the red carpet, laughing together and flashing big smiles at each other as they locked arms.
In a 1998 interview with the Seattle Times, Jackson reflected on his parents’ divorce as being a “very traumatic experience” for him.
“It was just me, my sister, and my mother, and we went it alone,” he said at the time. “I went from being a very well-off little kid to having a couple rough years, to rebuilding – my mother did that. She and I are very close.”
Just last year, during an interview on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s “Dinner’s On Me” podcast, Jackson opened up about feeling “sympathy” for his father after his death now that he is a “grown man with a child” himself.
“My father, who I never became close with, also passed away. And I find myself, for the first time, with a great deal of sympathy for him, because the pain that he must have lived with to have four children in the world and essentially no relationship with any of them…,” the actor said.
“If I ever did anything to estrange my daughter from myself, I would be bereft,” he added.
Jackson shares daughter Juno, 6, with ex-wife Jodie Turner-Smith, whom he married in August 2019.
Turner-Smith filed for divorce from the “Cruel Intentions” star in October 2023 after four years of marriage.
The former couple were set to battle it out in front of a judge over custody of Juno last October but ultimately agreed to settle their differences outside the courtroom.
Read the full article here
