Joshua Jackson Could Make a Sailor Blush

It would be hard enough to perform an emergency appendectomy on your coworker-slash-lover without requiring the aid of your romantic rival who is also your coworker. It would be hard enough to do surgery as a throuple if you weren’t also doing it on a cruise ship keening violently in the eye of a hurricane, and the ship is being steered by a First Mate high on shrooms after accidentally ingesting psychoactive saltwater taffy. Did we mention the shroom-taffy was a gift from guest star Amy Sedaris, who is suffering copper poisoning from a raw-organ meat diet? Or that the tripping first mate earlier lost his shirt to his boss in a game of strip poker for “boys, butches, and bi’s”? So goes a single day with Doctor Odyssey, a cross between The Love Boat and ER filtered through the lunatic mind of Ryan Murphy and the nuttiest, most delightful new series in a minute. At the center of this storm is Joshua Jackson as the titular maritime doctor, giving a performance heavy on what he calls “sparkle.” He knows it’s ridiculous. That’s why he loves it.

At 46, the Canadian-born actor’s done his fair share of “shit and misery,” playing dramatic leading roles across a career that reads like a survey course in TV trends of the past 30 years. He did the teen heartthrob thing for over 100 episodes as Pacey on Dawson’s Creek. He led J.J. Abrams’s cult-favorite Fringe, the ambitious sci-fi follow-up to Lost. He did sexy 2010s prestige, co-starring in The Affair on Showtime before shifting to streaming with a buzzy adaptation of bestseller Little Fires Everywhere, then playing against type as a sociopathic quack in true crime adaptation Dr. Death. Jackson’s latest gig steers him into uncharted waters as star and executive producer; the mandate on Odyssey, he says, is just to have fun. “For us, the bellwether of a good scene is, Did you enjoy that?”

On shore leave in New York, Jackson brings that playful energy to the dark wood-paneled lobby bar of the Ritz-Carlton on a cloudy day. The ABC series is demanding, with long shoot days and an almost throwback-length 18-episode order for the first season, all of which he balances with parenting his four-year-old daughter. The past several years also hasn’t been what anyone would call smooth sailing: In the aftermath of a very public divorce from actress Jodie Turner-Smith, and another public breakup a year later with actress Lupita Nyong’o, his longtime Topanga Canyon home was ravaged by January’s LA fires. Heavy shit, yes, but in a conversation over tea, Jackson’s disarmingly charming and unflappable, expounding on fan theories, filming threesomes, and the discerning professional’s way to simulate certain sex acts. Did you enjoy that? He sure does.

How are you doing after the L.A. fires? 
A friend of mine allowed us to stay at her place in the immediate aftermath, so we kind of landed on our feet. Now we’ll just get into this new normal while I rebuild. Realistically, I’m at least two years away from moving back into my house.

Why is it significant to you that Doctor Odyssey is an L.A.-based production?
L.A. is the spiritual home of the entertainment industry. There are a lot of excellent tradespeople who live and work in Los Angeles who have been having to live and work elsewhere for the last however many years. I’ve never worked on a more production-run show from day one. This is one of Ryan’s crews, and it’s also a group of people who have done this for a very, very long time, who know what they’re doing and know how to work together. Nobody’s figuring it out on the fly. I’ve worked in a lot of satellite production bases and you’ll have some very good people and lots of people who are willing to learn, but the town itself is ten to 25 years away from being a production base, and it materially affects the quality of what we do.

Not just in those technical aspects but in the storytelling, this show feels like a return to a type of network programming we’ve been missing in the streaming era.
It looks slick and modern and beautiful, yes, but is also very much a throwback to an old version of television, which is like, “Hey, come with us for 45 minutes. We’re gonna take care of you.” Ryan’s initial pitch to me was, “We’ve all been holding our breath for the last four years. I want to make a show where everybody can exhale.”

It’s fun in a way that feels like other shows have forgotten how to be.
This is a weird category error we make in the industry, but also in general, where we think being an adult has to be serious and, somehow, if you’re not dour, you’re not a serious person. Make it sparkle a little bit! That used to be the basis of the entertainment industry all through the golden era. I’m not pooh-poohing some of these other shows because amazing stories were told. But a lot of shows lost the fun and are just grindingly heavy all the time.

What made you decide to say “yes” to Ryan’s pitch?
I wanted to be in L.A. because my daughter’s about to start school and I’ve been doing heavy things for a long time. I wanted to do something lighter, that’s witty and banter-y and fast-paced and, to use the word again, sparkly. He pitched me this idea, and I loved it because it has a natural story engine with a new sailing every week. There’s a certain kind of beautiful liberation to that because a lot of shows get so bogged down in their own mythology. As an actor, I get 20 episodes in and I’m like, Well, my dad died, my dog got run over, my cousin had cancer, I’m a drug dealer, I’m about to get arrested. Like, yeah, I would be depressed. With Odyssey, we have a couple through-line stories, but by and large, there’s a new group of people to play with each week. That’s the mission statement: Just play.

It’s a TV show that’s not ashamed to be a TV show.
Joy is harder than sadness in life and in storytelling. To tell a truly morose story is not that hard. To be witty and playful and joyful is an intentional choice. Not to disparage the entire group of people who keep me alive, which is writers, but I think in general writers are not the most joyful people in the world, so that is not a natural space for them. Neither for actors; we’re not the most together group of people. It is hard for us to find reasons to be happy, and it is easier to play the sad notes of the scene than it is to find joy in the scene.

Max Bankman is a dashing leading man to an almost cartoonish degree. What is your take on the character? 
He’s extremely Marlboro Man in the modern era.

How do you build a character out of that?
How to make a human out of the character?

Yeah.
Do you think I did? Because I’m not sure I did. And I’m not being self-deprecating. I feel like Max is more iconographic than anything. He does have a backstory, but I’m more interested in him as an icon, rather than, Who’s the man behind the curtain?

What iconography specifically are you playing on?
There’s a lot of Cary Grant in there. In the modern era, it would be Clooney. Max always has the answer; he’s never thrown by anything that happens. Even in his moments of self-reflection, he’s not really thrown. We’re lifting from that era of man where the pose is important. Even the posture, the stiffness and rigidity, is very much a part of it.

With radically different sexual politics, though.
Though we were way, way looser before we got way, way more conservative.

Cary Grant: famous possible bisexual.
Yeah, and those movies were bawdy. If you go all the way back to the beginning of the talkies, the language and the presentation is different, but there’s stuff that would be challenging today because our culture has this complete schism. I think we’re even more conservative now than when I was shooting Dawson’s Creek. Like, way more conservative.

Elaborate.
When we did the first press junket for Dawson’s Creek, there was a woman from some sort of Christian women’s daily publication. She was outraged that Dawson and Joey had a conversation about their emergent attraction to each other on top of the sheets, in clothes. Even before I was a parent, I recognized that that’s the best-case scenario for what could possibly happen. Two horny teenagers, fully clothed, discussing what would happen if they crossed that bridge together. At the same time, my teenage character is having sex with his adult teacher, and that didn’t come up.

In the third season of Dawson’s, we had two teenage boys kiss each other, which at the time was scandalous yet got absorbed into the body politic, and our audience of young people wasn’t really freaked out by it. I feel like now, on one side, we have pure transgression, but by and large, popular entertainment is really down the middle and doesn’t push the edges. I made Fatal Attraction a couple of years ago, and honestly, I was frustrated with how the sex scenes were depicted, because that story’s about power and dominance. They’re not making love, it’s not sweet and gauzy — that’s a different kind of sex. This sex is not about the sex, it’s about power. And there’s a transgression to that that is interesting. But we’re so afraid now, particularly of sexual dominance and power dynamics between men and women, as though to put something on camera is to advocate for it.

You mentioned precode Hollywood, and Doctor Odyssey being on network TV seems to echo that. You’ve really rode the Zeitgeist this season with the throuple-threesome stuff. 
I actually think that scene in particular turned out better because it’s on network TV. If we had been on, say, Netflix and we didn’t have the constrictions we had, you probably would have had some gauzily lit, writhing, oiled bodies. Everybody’s seen that 10,000 times.

I’ve weirdly become something of a sex-scene expert over the course of my years of acting. I had the weirdest conversation with the intimacy coordinator about that. I had watched this sex scene where there’s a certain position that is usually just shot terribly.

Can you specify?
Yes. So in the show, they’re having sex doggy style. On TV, it never looks like real life. This is always my problem in these scenes. I go, Oh man, this is not my experience of sex at all. It never looks vigorous. But there was this scene, and I was like, Oh my God, it really looks like these two people are having sex with abandon, and it’s because some genius was like, we put this half-deflated beach-ball thing between the two of them and you can’t see it and then they’re able to move with a full range of motion. I was like, That’s fucking brilliant! I’m so disappointed in myself that I never thought of this. But it has revolutionized the sex-scene game.

Anyway, so the throuple, because we had all those constraints of who could touch and when and how many people could be touching at the same time, it allowed us to explore the dominance she was displaying over these two men. I thought that was so much more interesting than just three bodies jumbled on top of each other. And it really spoke to the story’s reason for that to exist. Other than our three leads having sex, here is the dynamic in its totality: the older man, the younger man, and the woman who is constructing her fantasy in real time. We’re so sensitive to putting women in sexually subordinate or exploitative positions now that I think we’ve also cut off the opportunity to present women in sexually dominant positions and examine the interplay of power, which is a big part of sexuality. It has really limited that portion of storytelling.

You have gone through all the phases of sex symbol. You did the teen Tiger Beat thing, and now you’re on a show where girls and guys alike are calling you Daddy. How do you feel about that?
It still makes me blush when you say it, so I guess that’s a good thing. It’s not really part of my self-conception. I’ve been doing this for 36 years. I’m very happy to still get to do it and still have people tune in.

Do you feel objectified?
Yeah, that’s part of it, 1,000 percent. Not for nothing, we are in those whites 90 percent of the time.

Having participated in so many phases of TV throughout your career, what have you learned?
Our show is formally ambitious in a way that even Fringe at its most ambitious couldn’t really get away with. Ryan is extremely disciplined in the length of his scripts. On Fringe, we were shooting all this additional material, which meant you had to really simplify the way we were shooting the show, which obviously then translates into the finished product. On Odyssey, we’ve had a couple of episodes that actually came in short that we added scenes to, which I’ve never experienced before. Ryan’s mandate is, we’re not going to throw away work, which gives us the time to be ambitious. And unless 80 percent of these problems are resolved in preproduction, you’re not even going to have the chance to make a show. You really have to focus on doing the edit on the page before it gets to the floor. I think the old days of “Shoot it fat and then take a chain saw to it” are over, at least in Ryan’s world. The idea is not just to send a bunch of indiscriminate footage to the editor and hope they’ll find a show in there somewhere.

I’m curious about the medical-procedural side of this. 
As much as ABC would not like me to say this, I don’t consider it to be a medical show. I don’t actually think that’s the plot device that drives it. I definitely tried to lift from Clooney in ER a lot, letting the smile be in your eyes for the whole scene and taking it from there. That’s kind of what the show is. We’re not working on The Pitt. 

You’re working with a gold-accented MRI machine on a cruise ship.
The infirmary is like an Art Deco Apple store.

You need to trust that an ABC Thursday-night audience is going to buy into this and go along for the ride.
If there’s a risk to the show, that’s the risk. What we are trying to do is take you away on this little one-hour cruise every week, and we are going to present this as seriously as possible so you get to enjoy the process. It’s not supposed to be camp. It’s not sarcastic. If we were trying to break the fourth wall, it would all fall apart. But also, you’re not going to learn much about medicine watching Doctor Odyssey, and that’s okay. There are other shows for that.

Who has been your favorite patient so far?
Every week, especially for those first four or five episodes, we had some brilliant comedian guest stars. You have Rachel Dratch or Amy Sedaris doing their thing, playing these characters to the point of absurdity. Letting these guys cook is amazing. And then you have the main cast to ground the circus. We have a crossover episode where Angela Bassett, who plays a literally buttoned-down cop on 9-1-1, is in ball gowns and jewels and we’re playing poker and I got to flirt my ass off with her. She is fabulous in every way.

Don Johnson is giving such a twinkle-in-his-eyes performance. What are scenes like with him?
There was a scene the other day where Don is doing some serious captain-y stuff, and he turns around and hits us with the wry smile. I heard Sean Teale actually giggle behind me. I’ve played so many characters where there’s no sparkle, it’s heavy, a lot of it is shit and misery. It’s hard to wring yourself out like that emotionally. For us, the bellwether of a good scene is “Did you enjoy that?” 

Has a script ever made your jaw drop?
The “Quackers” episode. I was like, “First off, is this a real thing?” The answer was “yes.” And then the whole duck in the necrotic bowel. I was like, “This is fucking gross.” As I was doing it, I was like, “You’re not gonna be able to put this on TV.” But I was wrong. We did some truly foul shit in that one that did not make it into the episode. What you actually see of the procedure on the necrotic bowel is like 10 percent of what that procedure actually is and the amount of, like, goo and ooze. I’m not usually squeamish while we’re shooting, but that was nasty.

A couple of hints have been dropped about Doctor Odyssey having a Broadway Week in its themed sailing rotation. 
Every time we need a MacGuffin, it comes from the Broadway Week box.

Is this leading up to a Broadway Week episode?
I hope so. It drives Pippa crazy when I say this, so if, in some way, you can just get “Pippa Soo demands Broadway Week on Doctor Odyssey” into this article, that would be great. All year long, I’ve been like, Well, the next episode will clearly be Broadway Week. I cannot believe we got to the end of the season without it. We have Phillipa Soo, one of the leading-light voices of Broadway. I am not a very good singer, but I will be game. And if it requires us busting out into song and dance for an episode with no rhyme or reason, fine, we can do that. This is the Odyssey. We can do anything!

Are there any other theme weeks you’ve really been pushing for?
We have collectively decided we need to have a Pirate Week.

Does your daughter understand what you do?
At the highest level? Yes, she knows I do make-believe for a living, and she has come on set twice now. Right at the very beginning of the show, we were shooting at an actual cruise ship in San Diego where they also have this giant pirate ship. We were going through a big Moana phase, and I thought, She’s gonna love this. And she was totally uninterested. She basically stayed in the trailer. But flash forward nine months, I brought her to work after school and she was more engaged. I’m not sure how much interest she’ll have as she gets older, but sets are not great environments for kids. As much as possible, I’ll just remain Dad.

Have you been paying attention to the reception of the series?
I guess I would say I’m moderately paying attention, and I’m really hopeful the reception is strong enough for them to give us a second season. I try as best as I can, just for my own psychological well-being, to not dive in too deep. But I definitely did a medium-deep dive on the whole “This is purgatory” conspiracy because I think that’s so funny, and, if it’s true, is awesome. I am totally for it, 1,000 percent.

That was the question I was leading up to this whole time. 
The only person on earth who gets to make that decision will be Ryan, but he likes the idea. For sure, our writers are also in those message boards and are tweaking people along the way, but maybe they’re just laying the groundwork. I really don’t know, but I will find out a couple of weeks before everybody else if it does go that way. I’m legitimately all for it. I think it would be hysterical because then you could do crazy things. Are we in Dante’s Inferno? Do we go through the seven circles? Are we in purgatory one season, then it’s hell, then we’re in heaven?

I’ve seen Reddit threads where people are reading it as Homer’s Odyssey.
I would just like to tell Christopher Nolan we got there first.

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