**There are no specific questions and answers, so I’ve typed up the whole article.**

**Josh’s words are in bold**

 

Joshua Jackson is making waves on the Staten Island Ferry, in New York harbour.  Looking pretty damn suave in a tan trench coat, he bravely withstands a shrill surge of teens preparing to exit the Manhattan-bound boat.  “Josh can I have your autograph?” the school girls shriek.  The giggles and squeals increase each time another Dawson’s Creek fan recognises the tall blue-eyed actor who plays Pacey, and anyone carrying a camera frantically starts clicking away. Even a few parents get in on the action – for their kids, they say.  And Josh claims he hasn’t  “moved into heart-throb zone” yet. “Generally, I don’t cause tumult” he says modestly, after weathering the chilly sightseeing trip around the Statue of Liberty, during a visit to The Big Apple.

 

Of course, we know different.  In four seasons on Dawson’s Creek, the 22-year-old actor has captured the hearts of the nation and, these days, causes tumult pretty much anywhere he goes.  And just look at his storylines.  Pacey has gone from a hot and heavy affair with one of his teachers to a year-long relationship with Andie to courting and now dating Joey.  “He’s got that wounded-puppy-dog thing working,” says Michelle Williams (Jen)

 

If Josh is working that wounded-puppy-dog thing in real-life, he’s not saying.  Although he dated co-star Katie briefly in 1998 – and more recently he went out with “an older woman” he won’t name – he usually refuses to talk about his romantic life.  Today, as he warms up with a Starbucks cappuccino after his boat ride, he’s being a little more open.  So when we ask if there’s truth in the rumour he’s seeing Charmed actress Alyssa Milano, he laughs. “As much as I would love for a rumour like this to spread the world over, I’m forced to be the bearer of bad tidings – we’re not dating! I know her through our TV network, but we’re not involved.” (thank you god!!)

 

Aside from his real-life relationships, we really want to know how things go with Joey this series.  Will she stay with Pacey? Josh spends a moment thinking carefully about his reply. “I’m honestly not sure,” he finally admits. “My gut feeling is that the fundamental building block of this entire show has always been the relationship between Joey and Dawson.  But I also believe the underdog’s got to triumph sometime.”   He pauses, then appeals directly to the show’s writers: “C’mon! Let the sidekick get the girl!  Another more selfish reason I want Pacey and Joey to stay together is I love working opposite Katie Holmes – she’s just an incredible and natural talent.”

 

But Josh isn’t exactly lacking in talent himself.  In 1997, he was filming Apt Pupil, playing the best friend of a Nazi-obsessed high-school student (Brad Renfro) when he travelled to North Carolina to read for a pilot episode of a new teen series – Dawson’s Creek.  Weirdly, he auditioned for the parts of Pacey and Dawson.  “Of all the actors who read, he was the most talented,” says the show’s creator, Kevin Williamson. “I was originally going to cast Pacey as not quite as attractive, not quite as sexually appealing,” he explains, “I wanted Dawson to have all that babe quality and Pacey to be the nerdy side-kick.  But when I had Josh read Pacey, I realised that he encompassed all that, plus he had the magnetism and the charisma and the sex appeal.  He was perfect”

 

Josh leads a relatively quiet life in Wilmington, North Carolina, where Dawson’s Creek is filmed, sharing a small house with a half-Labrador, half-Rhodesian Ridgeback, called Shumba.  “It’s a two-bedroom, one-storey cottage with lots of wood panelling,” he explains, with a smile.  “It’s kind of like a college house, and since I went off to Dawson’s Creek at the age where most people go off to college, I suppose that’s fitting.”  Since filming for the series eats up 2 to 14 hours a day, Josh makes the most of his free time.  “On the weekends, when I’m not working, I try to do just that – not working,” he says. “I read, listen to CDs, and I watch Law and Order and The Simpsons.  In warmer months, I spend most of the weekend at the beach.”

 

In fact his only major splurge since he began the show and started collecting a regular pay check, is a jet-ski. “You should note,” he says in the teasing tone that has made Pacey so popular, “that I hold the jet-skiing speed-record among the cast and crew: 69.6 miles an hour!” And he admits to no vices – except drinking too much coffee and wearing unwashed socks, “It doesn’t bother me so much,” he says of the dirty laundry, ”but formal complaints have been lodged!”

 

Fame and recent fortune certainly haven’t gone to the star’s head, though. “I don’t know that I would ever aspire to the level of madness of Leo DiCaprio in those two years after Titanic.  The fame aspect is bullshit.  But I want to keep the money people interested.  I’m not a flagrant consumer.  No Mercedes for me.  But I definitely like having cash in my pocket.”

 

These days, he must have more cash than he ever imagined.  After all, in addition to his mega-hit series, Josh recently starred in two major successful movies, Gossip and The Skulls, taking the lead role in each case. “I really feel Josh is our future Tom Hanks, “says The Skulls director Rob Cohen. “There’s that same quality of decency and humanism and intelligence.”  But his The Skulls co-star, Leslie Bibb, of new TV series Popular, says that while people compare him to Tom Hanks, “he’s just Josh, a really talented, kind, giving person.”

 

He might be breaking into the big time but Josh is no newcomer to the business.  He got his first role when he was just a few months old. “I was in a film called The Changeling, because my mother was an assistant director,” he reveals.  At nine, he began working as an extra on American TV series. “My mother explained to me that the kids on TV get paid,” he ways, still sounding surprised.  Then, on his eleventh birthday, he got his first real speaking part, in the movie Crooked Hearts – and his first screen kiss, Josh did better on set that he did in school.  He was kicked out of two high schools in Vancouver and admits he shared Pacey’s disciplinary problems. “Certainly at his age, I used humour as this kind of defence mechanism and had this weird idea of nobility.”  Buy this time, he was already working steadily.  Between the ages of 12 and 19, he had roles in 10 movies, including Digger, Scream 2 and all three The Mighty Ducks movies.  But then he his a dry spell. “The current explosion of teen roles hadn’t happened yet,“ he says, explaining that the fear of failure was constantly hanging over him. “I was really kind of considering handing it up as an actor.  I couldn’t even get a job as a waiter, because I was too young to serve alcohol.”

 

Despite his stints as a leading man, Josh doesn’t feel quite reading to leave TV behind. “At this age, I like television because it gives me the opportunity to work all the time and to work out the kinks in my acting that could take years otherwise.”  But he could find he’s leaving Dawson’s sooner than we expect.  Ask him how the show will survive next year, when everyone graduates from high school, and he sighs and takes a sip of coffee. “I think it’s going to be tough.  Leaving high school is leaving everything and everyone you know.  I think to make the show work, you would have to be true to that aspect of leaving the nest and not have everyone go to Capeside University.  With that said, Pacey is a tough one.  He’s not exactly college material – maybe he’d be the one to skip college to join the working rank and file.”

 

So what will life be like after Dawson’s? “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I hope it will be slower – meaning there would be more time to relax, reflect and simply enjoy life day by day.  I would love to take time off between projects to let it all sink in, not rush from one thing to the next.” And here’s where Josh is markedly different from Pacey: “Also, I would love to take some classes, and perhaps go to university.”

 

Right now, there doesn’t seem much chance of that.  Josh recently wrapped filming a small role in an independent movie, The Safety of Objects.  He plays a kid in a coma after a car accident – “It’s a great ensemble cast!” he enthuses.  And at the end of January he started on another film, Lone Star State of Mind, a comedy set in a small Texas town, “I play an affable, good ol’ boy who promises his fiancé, who happens to be his stepsister, that he will keep her cousin out of trouble,” he explains, effortlessly reverting to a Southern drawl.

 

With that, a limo pulls up outside Starbucks.  Josh’s next stop is a big US TV show, his second of the day (he did Rosie O’Donnell this morning).  Life definitely isn’t slowing down. “Isn’t that Pacey?” asks a middle-aged woman as Josh slips into the car.  But before she can get his autograph – for her daughter, of course – he’s gone.