Interview: Joshua Jackson
Die Another Day
In One Week, Joshua Jackson plays a guy who takes a trip across Canada after finding out he’s about to die. What would Jackson do in that situation? He’s been thinking about it…and he doesn’t have a clue
By Ingrid Randoja
Just as his career and personal life are flourishing, Joshua Jackson is facing his own demise — on screen that is.
The 30-year-old actor — who’s presently earning kudos for his turn as the brilliant skeptic Peter Bishop on the hit sci-fi series Fringe, and who, off screen, is happily in love with fellow actor Diane Kruger — plays a dying man in writer/director Michael McGowan’s indie drama One Week.
The Canadian flick casts Vancouver native Jackson as middle school teacher Ben Tyler, who, after learning he has terminal cancer, leaves his fiancée (Liane Balaban) and sets out on a motorcycle road trip across Canada, travelling from Toronto to Tofino, B.C., in search of inner peace.
While on a break from shooting Fringe, Jackson made a trip to Toronto to talk about making One Week, and what it was like to play a dying man, ride across the Prairies and touch the Stanley Cup.
One Week asks the question, “What would you do if you knew you had only a few months to live?” What would you do in that situation?
“Honestly, almost two years after making the film, I don’t know. Part of me feels like I’d attack the doctor if they told me. I’m happy and I’m in love, and I’d love to believe I’d spend my last year being in love with Diane, but who knows? Who knows if there’s some deeply buried thing that would pop out in a flash and say, ‘But you always wanted to do...this.’ It’s an impossible scenario to be confronted with.”
Tell us about playing a man who is incredibly passive, who isn’t in touch with his emotions whatsoever.
“He’s learning to live life presently, that’s not an easy thing to do, but I think the crisis of Ben’s life is not cancer. The crisis of Ben’s life is that he’s not actually living. He’s fallen into a trap that everybody falls into for some portion of their life, that he’s living a life that looks good to other people. It’s like getting married is the right thing to do because your parents will be happy and because you feel like you’ve strung this girl along for too long. You have a job that’s not really satisfying, but it looks good. He has one of those ‘on paper’ lives, which is no kind of life.”
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You shot the film in sequence, travelling from Ontario to B.C. Did you have a favourite location, a place you fell in love with?
“I was caught most off guard by the Prairies, just how beautiful the Prairies were. I grew up in a mountainous place so there’s always a reference for how far away things are, but the Prairies literally goes on as far as the eye can see in every direction and there is not a bump. So to be in place that is not on a human scale I can understand is humbling and awe-inspiring.”
There’s a wonderful scene in the film in which Ben gets to touch, in fact kiss, the Stanley Cup. Considering you starred in The Mighty Ducks movies when you were just a kid, and are a huge hockey fan, that must have been awesome.
“Every Canadian will understand exactly what that moment would be like.”
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And of course you don’t have to worry because you’re not an NHL player. They believe it’s bad luck to touch it — if you do, you won’t win.
“Right, picking up the Cup was also a sad moment because I had to actually, finally, come to the realization I was never going to play pro hockey [laughs]. It’s a double-edged sword. It’s like, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever done because I get bragging rights forever, and I just realized my most cherished childhood dream has just died.”
One Week has a lot of scenes where your face is shown while a narrator speaks. I would think that requires a different sort of acting.
“You do know there’ll be some sort of editorializing about what is going on, although it’s not my voice, but this omnipotent voice that’s more conscious than Ben is of what is actually going through Ben’s mind at that moment. But that wasn’t too constraining, and I didn’t feel the need to sell the story.”
It made me think of Rushmore, which uses voiceover so well.
“Rushmore is the pinnacle of that type of film, the very tippy top. To me, that is by far Wes Anderson’s best movie, and he’s made other movies I love, but that one...there’s a sort of alchemy that goes into filmmaking because that same man, with the same group of inspired, creative people around him will never quite get back to whatever the thing was that is Rushmore, and that’s why filmmaking is frustrating, but also so beautiful.”
So do you believe filmmakers and artists make their best work when they are young and inspired?
“People say that all the time, but I really don’t think that’s the case. There are a lot of people who have this burning creativity earlier in their life, but I actually think you become a richer storyteller the older you get. I would say the majority of really good filmmakers have to do it several times. I’m not of the opinion that you have your moments, and then you are done, like Kurt Cobain.”
So where do you feel you’re at, in regards to your career trajectory?
“I feel like I am just now getting into the best portion of my career. For the first time in my life I’m a man. I’m well through the early 20s, I’m past the mid-20s blahs, it takes a couple of years to grow up — and I say this now and then I’m going to go and do something really stupid [laughs] — but I’m not mixed up. Well no, I'm mixed up in the 30-year-old way, not the 25-year-old way.”
Ingrid Randoja is the deputy editor of Famous.