First time for everything! Joshua Jackson stopped in the middle of a live TV interview to give a sweet shout-out to his and Jodie Turner-Smith‘s daughter.
The 43-year-old actor appeared on the Tuesday, June 7, episode of the Today show alongside Dr. Death costar Christian Slater. While discussing his time filming Dawson’s Creek, Jackson took a moment to send love to his family at home.
“If I can for one second. This is the first time my daughter is watching me on TV,” the Canadian actor told the cohosts. “So if I can just say, ‘Hi baby. Daddy loves you. I’ll be home tonight!’”
When Dylan Dreyer asked about the little one’s name, the Mighty Ducks star clarified, “We don’t say the name just because there’s a lot of crazies out there.”
Joshua Jackson & Christian Slater are live on TODAY! pic.twitter.com/eYhRs4MXwn
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) June 7, 2022
Jackson’s special message came as he was reflecting on his experience as a teen heartthrob on the WB series. “It’s honestly hard to define down into one [favorite] memory,” he gushed of Dawson’s Creek. “For me, this sort of slots into my college years so for me it is that place. It was an innocent time where we were in Wilmington, North Carolina, and had a group of young actors to just go and play with all the time. And it had everything, you know. It had all the wonderful, sweet things that you have at that time of your life and it had all the difficult, angsty things [too]. … I can’t believe it’s been 25 years.”
Flashing forward to his life as a father, Jackson couldn’t be happier, telling the Today cohosts all about his daughter. “She’s 25 months, as she’s happy to tell you,” he teased.
The Fringe alum and Turner-Smith, 35, welcomed their first child in April 2020. Us Weekly previously broke the news in December 2019 that Jackson and the British actress were married and expecting their first child. Last year, an insider exclusively told Us that the pair had thought about expanding their family further.
“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 source added in April 2021. “They’re already talking about baby No. 2. Jodie thinks pregnancy is such a beautiful thing.”
The insider told Us that the couple view parenthood as a “blessing,” adding, “They couldn’t be more grateful. It’s nice to see Joshua as a doting father, and Jodie is a very hands-on mother.”
Though they have yet to reveal their toddler’s name, the pair have given glimpses of their life as a family of three. In July 2021, Jackson exclusively told Us how fatherhood has changed his outlook.
“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,” he said at the time. “It just expands every single day.”
