Confirming that Team Pacey was absolutely the right choice if nothing else, Joshua Jackson is coming to his wife Jodie Turner-Smith’s defence over the “racist and misogynist” backlash she received for proposing to him first.
The Dawson’s Creek star, who’s currently scrubbing away his on-screen good-guy image by playing a scalpel-wielding sociopath in Dr. Death, shared last month how the Queen & Slim actor popped the question during a romantic vacation in Nicaragua back in 2019.
Since then, Jackson said, Turner-Smith has been the target of online hate, lamenting in a new Refinery29 profile that “the internet is racist and misogynist.”
“I accidentally threw my wife under the bus because that story was told quickly and it didn’t give the full context,” he told the outlet in an attempt to clarify the sweet story.
“Yes, we were in Nicaragua on a beautiful moonlit night, it could not possibly have been more romantic. And yes, my wife did propose to me and, yes, I did say yes.”
Jackson went on to explain that after Turner-Smith proposed to him, he asked to return the favour, adding, “I’m still old school enough that I said, ‘This is a yes, but you have to give me the opportunity [to do it too].’”
“She has a biological father and a stepdad, who’s the man who raised her. [I said], ‘You have to give me the opportunity to ask both of those men for your hand in marriage,’” he continued. “And then, ‘I would like the opportunity to re-propose those to you and do it the old fashioned way down on bended knee.’ So, that’s actually how the story ended up.”
Directing his attention to “anybody who is freaked out by a woman claiming her own space,” Jackson bluntly told the naysayers to “shut the fuck up.”
“Good God, you cannot believe the things people were leaving my wife on Instagram,” he added. “She did it. I said ‘yes.’ We’re happy. That’s it. That’s all you need to know.”
The two actors met in 2018 at a party, which led to a one-night stand, Turner-Smith revealed during an appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers in May.
The couple then tied the knot in 2019 and welcomed their first child together toward the start of the COVID-19 pandemic the following year.
For Jackson, the relationship has been a “real education for me as a white man,” he explained to Refinery29, pointing to the “truly shocking” messages Turner-Smith receives on social media regularly.
“It has been a necessary, but an unpleasant education in just the way people relate to Black bodies in general, but Black female bodies in specific,” he noted. “It is not okay. We have a long way to go.”
And, while he praised his wife’s strength in the face of such vitriol, he also likened the concept of a strong Black woman to being put in a “golden cage.”
“I would wish for my wife that she would not have to rise above with such amazing strength and grace, above the ugliness that people throw at her on a day to day,” he said. “I am impressed with her that she does it, but I would wish that that would not be the armour that she has to put on every morning to just navigate being alive.”
Responding to the interview in a gushing tweet on Wednesday, Turner-Smith reciprocated his adoration and then some.
“There aren’t enough words to properly elucidate my love and affection for the thoughtful and intelligent human being that is @VancityJax, actor husband and daddy extraordinaire,” she wrote.