Yes, Joshua Jackson Is Really That Charming

WHEN JOSHUA JACKSON entered the cultural consciousness, it wasn’t with a bang, but with a quack.

As The Mighty Ducks star Charlie Conway, Jackson was, for all intents and purposes, the movie’s straight man. He wasn’t tortured like Emilio Estevez’s Gordon Bombay, or goofy and bombastic like some of the Ducks’s other players. He was steady and true, charming and witty, and he became a sort of idyllic every boy—the kind of kid everyone would like to be and everyone’s parents wish they had. (There’s a reason they still make “Conway” Ducks jerseys. )

And yet, the thing is, that really does seem to be the kind of guy Jackson is, even now. When he shows up for our interview, Jackson is kind and open, offering up tidbits about his life even though we’ve been instructed not to ask personal questions. He’s just lost his family home in the Palisades Fires, but he’s also a dad now, so there’s a kind of calming serenity to him, like he’s all-too-aware of the fact that all of it—the fame, the money, the homes—could disappear at any moment… but he remains pretty zen about the future. He has his family, and he likes what he’s doing, so it seems like he’s in a good place, despite Mother Nature’s efforts to the contrary.

His fans seem to like him right back, too. While he’s played his share of despicable scumbags on-screen, like in Peacock’s excellent Dr. Death series a few years back, it’s when he plays the elevated everyman that his fanbase really seems to sit up and take notice. Some of that could be lust, borne of the Pacey Witter years on Dawson’s Creek, but Jackson seems to shine the brightest when he’s playing the kind of guy you’d kill to be friends with.

That’s certainly the case with his character on Doctor Odyssey, the soap (co-created by Ryan Murphy) that Jackson toplines on ABC. As Dr. Max Bankman, Jackson is part “hot doctor” stereotype, part Jimmy Buffett character. After almost dying from COVID, Max made the choice to get out of the hospital and onto a luxury liner, where he becomes a shockingly busy physician on the luxury boat known as the Odyssey. Quickly drawn into a love triangle involving his two nurses, Bankman’s time on screen is either spent lounging in resort wear or dealing with the fallout from, say, a Great White Shark attack on a surfer or someone going too hard on the ship’s “all you can eat” shrimp. It’s all a bit silly—the Odyssey’s stark white, glass, and wood medical suite is almost cartoonishly beautiful—but somehow, just like he’s always had a knack for doing, Jackson makes it work.

Men’s Health spoke to Jackson about his long-running career, why he loves L.A., and how he stays looking (and feeling) his best.

MEN’S HEALTH: You’ve had a long career in both film and TV, but what do you specifically like about episodic dramas, whether it be Dr. Death or Doctor Odyssey?

JOSHUA JACKSON: The thing about Doctor Odyssey is that I’ve never done a non-linear show before where it’s actually episodic TV. By and large, our stories are one episode long; the new cast comes on, we have that week’s events, and then it’s wrapped up by the end of the hour. Because there’s so much going on, it’s been fun to treat each episode as its own little mini movie, with their own beginning, middle, and end.

There are new challenges to that, I guess, but it’s really liberating because you just play what’s in front of you, which is really nice. I’ve never worked on a show where there weren’t consequences from episode two that played out in episode 13.

MH: You also haven’t been on a show with quite as many scenes shot in dark, murky water.

JJ: That’s true, and I’ve never [had a character] on a boat before. So it’s all brand new here.

MH: The show also films in L.A., which is not all that common right now. What does being in L.A. mean for you in terms of production, and also for your personal life and mental health?

JJ: It means a lot, and it’s only become more important recently.

Part of the reason I took this show was actually to be here in Los Angeles. I’m a father, and my daughter has started her school life, so it was important for me to be here now and to be here for as long as I possibly can while she’s in school, so I can be a dad.

It’s also important, just in the broader sense, because there’s such an immense wealth of talent and expertise in this city, but it’s very often the case that you have to travel to work. For our community, which has gone through a couple very difficult years, from COVID into the strike… it’s been really difficult for a lot of people. It was important for me to be a part of something that is here because that allows everybody—not just myself—who works on the show to stay home and be with their families, be with their loved ones, or just be inside the community.

Over the course of the year, too, that’s only become more real, because we’ve just now gone through this very serious set of forest fires that has affected quite a few people, myself included, and so now more than ever, the opportunity to be part of a show that’s providing work and stability inside of this community that I’ve been a part of now for 30-plus years is really meaningful. Not just because it’s satisfying my need to be a good and present father, but because it gives us an opportunity to create right here, at home.

I mean, we’ll see if we get a second season. But even if we only have one season, we’re part of creating a stable production base in Los Angeles. And credit for that goes to Ryan [Murphy], who’s been a very vocal champion of the talent base in Los Angeles and the production base in Los Angeles.

MH: Speaking of Ryan Murphy: In a recent interview, he said that Doctor Odyssey is a tribute to the ABC shows of his youth. What were some of your favorite shows as a kid?

JJ: I was a little too young to really understand Love Boat, Dallas, and Fantasy Island, but for me, it would be MASH or Gilligan’s Island. Then MacGyver, and eventually Law & Order.

It’s a type of storytelling we got away from, I think, in television, where we made these very, very rich but deep but sometimes non-linear stories, where you didn’t have to be there every week to follow what was going on. There used to be a time where the contract between us [on screen] and the people watching was like, “Hey! Come on in. It’s going to be fine. You can watch episode 25 of The A-Team or episode 225 of The A-Team and you’ll get it. You’ll understand the dynamics of these characters.”

I think there’s something really beautiful about that. Ryan’s original way of describing it to me was that, “We’ve all, collectively, everywhere on the planet, been through a very difficult time where we’ve been holding our breath, and I want this show to feel like the exhale. Like, you can relax, because it’s going to be okay.”

MH: On Doctor Odyssey, part of Max Bankman’s whole thing is that he’s this hot doctor. Do you feel pressure to look great all the time?

JJ: I mean, yes, but—and this is maybe just the wisdom of age—in order to be able to do the hours we do, you have to maintain your body right, you have to eat well, and you have to work out, because these hours are so hard. But they’re part of the gig, and that’s just what it is. To keep your mind sharp enough to be able to perform at hour 70 on week 35 in month six or seven or eight or nine, you can’t just let it go by the wayside.

So yes, on this show, more than any show I’ve worked on in a long, long time, the presentation is important. With all of Ryan’s shows, the design and visual elements are really important, so there is a certain pressure to look a certain way. But more than anything, there’s a pressure to maintain your ability to do the job—because if you don’t, the hours stack up.

I will freely admit that there are days that your brain just goes to mush. You have to make sure you’re eating right and taking care of yourself, or else you don’t recover and you’re not ready to go the next day.

MH: And how do you do that? What’s an ideal workout for you?

JJ: It depends if we’re in-season or off-season. Generally speaking, if I’m trying to get a workout in—and I’ll freely admit that these last couple months I haven’t really been taking care of myself like that, because there’s been other stuff on the plate—but I’ll drop the baby off at school and on my way in to work, depending on what my call time is, I’ll try to get to the gym on the way in. Just get a sweat in, get the body moving, get my head right. In-season, I try to do that three times a week. If I get that, it’s a good week. And also, for physical exertion but also just mental health, I try to get a couple boxing sessions in every week, too.

MH: You’re about as old as me, and when we were growing up, you watched what you watched because that’s what was on TV at the time. There were no alternatives, really. If it was 8pm and you didn’t have cable, you were watching one of four things. Kids don’t have that as much now. People in general don’t, really. They won’t have that sort of collective memory of whatever today’s Gilligan’s Island would be 30 years from now.

JJ: Sometimes there’s too much choice and it can actually be overwhelming. But I do think that a lot of the stuff we used to watch wasn’t really for us; A lot of the cultural artifacts of that time were time-specific. You had to be of age in that specific time slot to really get it.

Now, though, things are evergreen. I’m shocked by having done this for so very long that so many of my friends’ kids watch things now that I worked on at the turn of the millennia. I think there’s a certain beauty to that, because it means it’s good storytelling, even though the production value has changed and the cultural mores may have shifted.

MH: When you first started acting, you were pretty young. Is this where you saw yourself going? I know it’s hard to think “and when I’m in my forties…” as a kid, but did you know what kind of career arc you wanted?

JJ: No. I mean, when I started, it wasn’t a career. When I started, it was my weekend job. It was like my paper route.

My film career, such as it was, started because my mother was a casting director. They were trying to cast a pair of boys to play younger versions of Peter Berg and Noah Wyle, who were playing brothers in this movie. My mom and her casting assistant Sandy Jorgensen were both single moms, so quite often me and her son Ryan would be in the office. And after going through trying to cast all these professional kids, finally, the director was like, “Well, what about these two yahoos? They know each other. Can they act like brothers?” And, so, that was the glorious beginning of my film career.

I don’t think I really started conceiving of it as something that I was allowed to do, even though my mother worked in the film industry. It just wasn’t a thing that you did. I don’t think I ever conceived of it as a possible career until we got into the Dawson’s years, and it was like, “This is a multi-year contract. I might have to come back and do this again.” Like, “I’m a grown up now. I have an ongoing responsibility.” And even then, if you’d asked me at 20 to conceive of myself at 40 or 46 like I am now, even if you gave me 10,000 guesses, I still wouldn’t have guessed this.

Stream Doctor Odyssey Here