After having a daughter of his own, Joshua Jackson finally has some clarity on his relationship with his late father.
“I am now a grown man with a child. I have my father who I never became close with, [who] also passed away,” the Doctor Odyssey star, 46, said on the Monday, April 21, episode of Sony Music Entertainment’s “Dinner’s On Me” podcast, hosted by Jesse Tyler Ferguson. “And I find myself for the first time with a great deal of sympathy for him.”
Jackson is the son of John Carter and Fiona Jackson. After his father left the family, Joshua and his siblings were raised by his mom. Despite having years of resentment, the Dawson’s Creek alum explained on Monday that he now has a sense of remorse after considering how the pair’s estrangement must have had an effect on his dad.
“Because the pain that he must have lived with,” he continued. “To have four children in the world and essentially no relationship with any of them.”
Joshua Jackson is just like any other girl dad — totally besotted with his daughter. Jackson, 46, felt such vivid love for his child, 4, whom she shares with ex-wife, Jodie Turner-Smith, that he took to Instagram on Tuesday, September 3, to post rare comments about his fatherhood journey. (Jackson and Turner-Smith, 37, have never […]
Joshua added that if a similar situation happened between him and his daughter — whom he welcomed with ex-wife Jodie Turner-Smith in April 2020 — he would be a “wreck.”
“I actually can’t conceive of it because I can’t even,” he said. “I don’t even want to think of the pain that would be.”
Since becoming a father, Joshua opened up about how stepping into the role as a parent has been a “self-healing” journey — which caught him by surprise.
“People are like, ‘Well, you’re really parenting yourself.’ You’re reparenting and all these things,” he said. “But until you’re experientially in them, or at least for me, I didn’t really get that until, until frankly some difficult things happen or the divorce happens and it’s like, ‘Oh, right.’”
Jodie Turner-Smith gave fans a rare peek into her life as a mom, opening up about what it’s like to coparent with her ex-husband, Joshua Jackson. “It’s an adjustment period for anyone when they split up with someone, because you’re used to being with your child all the time,” Turner-Smith, 38, told Glamour in an […]
Joshua and Turner-Smith, 38, split in October 2023 after four years of marriage. Us Weekly confirmed at the time that Turner-Smith filed for divorce.
As the actor navigates coparenting with Smith, he’s making sure he doesn’t make the same mistakes his father once did.
“It’s my job shared with my ex-wife to do everything that we can to nurture you, cultivate you, and give you all the tools that you need in life,” he said of his parenting approach with his daughter. “But man, it is not lost on me that. I am getting an opportunity to experience a father’s love in a way that I never experienced.”
Joshua added that while it’s difficult to face those “hard” moments, he’s doing everything he can to maintain a good relationship with his little one.
Jodie Turner-Smith shared a quote about how having a father in the household doesn’t ensure that a child will thrive. Turner-Smith, 37, who shares a 3-year-old daughter with Joshua Jackson, took to Instagram on Sunday, March 3, with a clip from the Black Podcast Gems account. The upload featured a conversation where the host asked […]
“My father’s response to difficulty was to run away,” he explained. “Instead of doing that, I have the opportunity to give my daughter the opposite experience, which is like, ‘Hey, there are going to be hard things … but you don’t run from them … you are better off for having faced it.”
Joshua previously spoke out about his strained relationship with his father when the actor decided to purchase his childhood home.
“My father unfortunately was not a good father or a husband and exited the scene,” he said in a July 2021 interview with men’s style brand Mr. Porter. “But that house in Topanga was where everything felt simple, so it was a very healing thing for me to do.”
