Forever changed! Becoming a parent has shifted Joshua Jackson’s acting perspective.
“A whole new world of things has just opened up to me in experiencing fatherhood and this magical, joyful, chaotic, stressful anxiety-inducing love that you did not know you had the capacity for,” the actor, 43, who shares a 14-month-old daughter with Jodie Turner-Smith, exclusively told Us Weekly on Thursday, July 8, while promoting his new series, Dr. Death. “It just expands every single day.”
The Canada native noted that “an actor’s life informs everything they do … and the choices” that they make.
Us broke the news in December 2019 that Turner-Smith, 34, was pregnant with their first child. The actress gave birth in April 2020, so Jackson started filming Dr. Death at the perfect time. The show originally cast Jamie Dornan as the lead role, but when the show was pushed due to the coronavirus pandemic, the 50 Shades of Grey actor, 39, had to exit.
“Frankly, if it had been six months earlier, I wouldn’t have taken the job because Jodie was still pregnant and I really wanted to obviously be there for all of that,” he explained to Us on Thursday. “This job was, like, cosmically the right job because it came at exactly the moment where it worked for me and I felt like I had the emotional bandwidth.”
The Little Fires Everywhere star gushed about his support system at home, saying he had a “beautiful wife [and] beautiful baby” to return to amid the “heavy” project. “My life is very warm and supportive,” the new dad said.
The couple wed in December 2019 and are “already talking about” conceiving baby No. 2, a source exclusively told Us in April.
“Their love for each other is deeply rooted and having a child together just brought them closer in ways they didn’t even know existed,” the insider said at the time. “They couldn’t be more grateful. It’s nice to see Joshua as a doting father, and Jodie is a very hands-on mother. … [She] thinks pregnancy is such a beautiful thing.”
The Queen & Slim star felt “lucky and privileged” to have Jackson by her side the first time around, she told British Vogue in July 2020.
“Both of us had watched our own mothers struggle to raise children without such support,” the England native explained to the magazine at the time. “Both of us were determined to create something for ourselves. He kept saying to me, ‘There’s no part of this that I’m going to miss.’”
With reporting by Emily Longeretta
